Alexey Petrukhin is a Russian actor, film director, screenwriter, producer and writer. He is widely known as the creator of the film Viy, the highest-grossing Russian film in 2014. In 2019, his team released the Russian-Chinese full-length feature film The Secret of the Dragon's Seal, with a budget of $ 50 million. In an interview, Alexei Petrukhin tells how the system of world and Russian cinema is built and what role cinema plays in the life of modern society:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCjDGk3RxsM
Theses of the conversation:
- One of the main functions of cinema is educational. Therefore, in any state, a censorship system should be built, which determines whether a particular script or film is useful to society, and decides whether to sponsor the filming of a film and whether to release it to wide distribution.
- In China, any film receives funding or gets into distribution only after the approval of special authorities, where each picture undergoes a comprehensive assessment of different specialists. The experience of working on the Secret Dragon Seal has shown that the system of control on the part of Chinese officials is very coherent.
- LGBT themes in modern films are a tool for population reduction.
- The American-British series Chernobyl is clearly a political film, one of the main goals of which is to discredit the Soviet past in the nuclear industry, and thereby undermine the potential of today's Russia in this area.
- Russia today does not have sovereignty in the field of film production and film distribution, so it is almost impossible to make films with a meaningful creative message in the current system.
- Cinema is inherently a media with enormous potential for influence. Graduates of Russian universities in the field of film production, in principle, do not understand this and are in misconceptions about the true role of cinema.
- Getting into the box office and getting your film out to a wider audience is a much more difficult process than raising money and making the film itself.
- The vast majority of films do not pay off at the box office and are shot primarily for political or ideological purposes, and not for money.
