PORTAL
016 |
Unless you are a keen follower of short
films on the festival circuit, Russian writer/
director/editor Kirill Sokolov is unlikely to
have crossed your radar. Yet his rambunctious
debut feature Why Don’t You Just Die! (Papa,
Sdokhni) – a vibrant, in-your-face action film,
confined mostly to a single, modestly-sized
apartment, and dripping with genre-hopping
style, punk attitude and pitch-black humour –
guarantees that you will be paying attention
when he next comes calling.
While studying physics in university,
cinephile Sokolov started making films: “I
[would] pick up my friends,” he tells us, “and
we [would make] crazy short movies, without
any scripts, with ketchup instead of blood, and
with chicken guts and other stuff. Suddenly I
understood that I got more fun doing that than
doing my regular job in the lab, so I decided
just to put all my time into movie-making. I then
made around six rather normal short movies.
A few of them were 30 minutes long, and they
travelled to festivals and I tried to get into the
film industry to make my first movie. It took
around five years to get to this point, and then
Why Don’t You Just Die! happened.”
Sokolov is open about both the referential
sensibility of his film, and the kind of audience
to whom it is likely to appeal most: “I am a
huge movie fan, and for me it is a very natural
thing to put my movie experience in the story
I am writing and trying to make. I think it’s a
kind of game. Probably the kind of peopleWWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UKWe speak to writer, director and editor, Kirill Sokolov, on deconstructing and rebuilding genre in his
latest movie, Why Don't You Just Die! WORDS ANTON BITELAPARTMENT OATER
who are movie fans, who watch a lot of
movies, can get more fun from Why Don’t You
Just Die! than regular people who, you know,
are not very good with movies.”
Sokolov’s influences for the film were
diverse: obviously Quentin Tarantino and
Sergio Leone, but also Park Chan-wook (“I’m
crazy about him”) and Korean filmmakers in
general for the way that “they mix genres,
and in one moment, you laugh, in the next
moment you care, and in the next moment you
feel some kind of romantic passion, and you
are happy at the end of the movie because
you went through that whole spectrum of
emotions”. He was also inspired by Martin
McDonagh (“his drama and his scripts, and
his sense of humour and irony, how he mixes
dark situations and characters, and puts itThe apartment set had to be destroyed
and then re-made many times...Director Kirill Sokolov (right) cites
many influences for his movie including
Quentin Tarantino and Park Chan-wook.with irony”), by Wong Kar-wai (“because
of his colours”) and even by Danny Boyle
(“especially how he works with editing. For
example, the joke with handcuffs – it was
inspired by Danny Boyle, you can find a very
similar thing in 127 H o u rs.”). He even made
the sound “like a kung fu movie of the Sixties –
lots of iron sounds and metal scratches.
“There are a lot of spaghetti westerns in it,”
he continues. “When I wrote it, I knew that it’s
my debut and I won’t have a lot of money. So,
how to make a story which is 90% based in
one location, with few actors, rather exciting
and different? That’s how it became a sort of
apartment western. We showed the conflict
between two guys in a regular apartment like
a western conflict. We put in the music and
the editing, and irony appears, and the genrePORTAL
016 |
Unless you are a keen follower of short
films on the festival circuit, Russian writer/
director/editor Kirill Sokolov is unlikely to
have crossed your radar. Yet his rambunctious
debut feature Why Don’t You Just Die! (Papa,
Sdokhni) – a vibrant, in-your-face action film,
confined mostly to a single, modestly-sized
apartment, and dripping with genre-hopping
style, punk attitude and pitch-black humour –
guarantees that you will be paying attention
when he next comes calling.
While studying physics in university,
cinephile Sokolov started making films: “I
[would] pick up my friends,” he tells us, “and
we [would make] crazy short movies, without
any scripts, with ketchup instead of blood, and
with chicken guts and other stuff. Suddenly I
understood that I got more fun doing that than
doing my regular job in the lab, so I decided
just to put all my time into movie-making. I then
made around six rather normal short movies.
A few of them were 30 minutes long, and they
travelled to festivals and I tried to get into the
film industry to make my first movie. It took
around five years to get to this point, and then
Why Don’t You Just Die! happened.”
Sokolov is open about both the referential
sensibility of his film, and the kind of audience
to whom it is likely to appeal most: “I am a
huge movie fan, and for me it is a very natural
thing to put my movie experience in the story
I am writing and trying to make. I think it’s a
kind of game. Probably the kind of people
WWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UKWe speak to writer, director and editor, Kirill Sokolov, on deconstructing and rebuilding genre in his
latest movie, Why Don't You Just Die! WORDS ANTON BITEL
APARTMENT OATER
who are movie fans, who watch a lot of
movies, can get more fun from Why Don’t You
Just Die! than regular people who, you know,
are not very good with movies.”
Sokolov’s influences for the film were
diverse: obviously Quentin Tarantino and
Sergio Leone, but also Park Chan-wook (“I’m
crazy about him”) and Korean filmmakers in
general for the way that “they mix genres,
and in one moment, you laugh, in the next
moment you care, and in the next moment you
feel some kind of romantic passion, and you
are happy at the end of the movie because
you went through that whole spectrum of
emotions”. He was also inspired by Martin
McDonagh (“his drama and his scripts, and
his sense of humour and irony, how he mixes
dark situations and characters, and puts itThe apartment set had to be destroyed
and then re-made many times...Director Kirill Sokolov (right) cites
many influences for his movie including
Quentin Tarantino and Park Chan-wook.with irony”), by Wong Kar-wai (“because
of his colours”) and even by Danny Boyle
(“especially how he works with editing. For
example, the joke with handcuffs – it was
inspired by Danny Boyle, you can find a very
similar thing in 127 H o u rs.”). He even made
the sound “like a kung fu movie of the Sixties –
lots of iron sounds and metal scratches.
“There are a lot of spaghetti westerns in it,”
he continues. “When I wrote it, I knew that it’s
my debut and I won’t have a lot of money. So,
how to make a story which is 90% based in
one location, with few actors, rather exciting
and different? That’s how it became a sort of
apartment western. We showed the conflict
between two guys in a regular apartment like
a western conflict. We put in the music and
the editing, and irony appears, and the genre