It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (24 page)

Then again, we hadn’t yet met ‘Mr Nyet’.

Looking back on this episode now, one question rings in my head: What on earth were we doing in Moscow in the first place? I don’t mean that in the cosmic, spiritual sense, but in a very real and material way. Why were we there? Why? Even before we left Heathrow, Nige and I had
known
that neither Mariano nor any significant members of his crew were going to be in Moscow when we arrived. I’m not even
sure now whether they were
ever
in Moscow – although the film would indeed wind up being edited there several months later. We had already ascertained that the ‘studio’ part of the
Dark Waters
shoot was going to take place in Odessa, which we had fondly imagined to be somewhere ‘near’ Moscow (in the same way that I had imagined Los Angeles to be ‘near’ New York). In this age of Google Maps it would take most people about ten seconds to discover that Odessa is actually in Ukraine, and nearer to London than Moscow, by some distance. It is also nearer to Kiev, which has an airport, and (crucially) is also in Ukraine. But in my geographically challenged head I think I had simply imagined that in order to get into ‘Russia’ (by which I really meant the former Soviet Union –
including
Ukraine) you
had
to go through Moscow, like the magical wardrobe which provided the only access to Narnia. And somehow, even though I
knew
this was not the case, I had conjured a scenario in my head in which our old pal Mariano, with whom we had got on so well in Pizza Express all those months ago, would have ‘popped up’ from the Odessa shoot to meet us upon our arrival in Moscow and welcome us with open arms before taking us out for a slap-up meal where he could tell us how brilliantly the film was going and how he was going to remember to thank me and Nige
personally
from the Oscar stage when the inevitable plaudits started rolling in. Knowing me (rather than knowing you) this sounds like exactly the kind of foolishly self-aggrandising scenario which I would have cooked up in my head and then convinced myself was true. Or ‘based on a true story’.

The only thing that was really ‘true’ however was that we were now further away from Mariano and
Dark Waters
than we had been when we got on the plane in London – both geographically
and
philosophically. As yet, however, the magnitude of our miscalculation was not quite clear.

Give it time.

At 2 a. m. , we shambled back off to the overground train station, tired, bedraggled, and generally not at our best. The station was largely empty and cold but a few seats in the middle of the vast open terminus offered somewhere to plonk our aching bones while we waited an hour for the train to arrive. As with the subway, the overground station was fantastically clean, a feature which sadly had its drawbacks. As we slumped huddled on to those lonely seats a man with a mop appeared, slopping his sanitary way inexorably toward us from a great distance. Like an escapee from a Samuel Beckett play he traversed great swathes of wide-open concourse, making a bee-line through the vast emptiness to the tiny cluster of chairs upon which we perched. He could have spent the next ten years mopping the empty floor around us on which
no one
was seated, but for some reason he wanted to mop the exact spot where we had taken root. So, with a few terse words, he got us all to get up and then proceeded to pack our chairs away in a pile and to mop the floor where they had once stood with the vigour of a murderer cleaning fingerprints from the scene of a crime. We stood, bleary-eyed, staring at him, wondering whether he was going to let us sit down again. But he wasn’t. We were going to have to stand. For an hour.

So we stood.

For an hour.

‘Incidentally,’ I asked in a stuporous drawl as the appointed time drew nearer.’How long
is
the journey to Odessa? Once we actually get on the train …’

‘Twenty-seven hours,’ replied Yolena matter-of-factly.

‘
Twenty-seven hours!?
’ Nige and I blurted in stunned unison.

‘Yes,’ Yolena confirmed, in calming tones.’Twenty-seven hours. We will arrive early in the morning.’

‘Early in the morning …
tomorrow
?’

‘Yes. Early in the morning …
tomorrow
. And now it is time to go to the train.’

As the clock struck three, our train appeared on the platform and we shuffled queasily toward its open doors. The culture shock was staggering. While you could have happily eaten your lunch off that ultra-clean station floor, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to take a dump on the dining tables of the train. The toilet (for which we’d been waiting with increasing agitation since the station toilet was closed ‘for cleaning’, naturally) was monstrous beyond belief. It was, in effect, a rusted tin trumpet voiding openly on to the track below, its sides encrusted with a cocktail of faeces and vomit. The ammonia-heavy acrid stench that festered in that tiny portable torture chamber could have been bottled and dropped on to battlefields with results which would surely have contravened internationally respected rules of warfare. Even if your bladder and bowels were so full that they were about to burst out of your body in the manner of John Hurt’s spectacular chestular eruptions in
Alien
, believe
me you’d
still
find it preferable to tie a knot in it or evacuate out of the window rather than avail yourself of the on-board conveniences.

They were, to be clear, not nice toilets.

The cabins weren’t much better.

They consisted of four fold-down bunk beds, each with a stinky mattress covered with a ‘cleaned’ sheet. You knew the sheet had been ‘cleaned’ not because it was actually ‘clean’ but rather because it was actually wet. At least, I hoped that was why it was wet. Frankly, by that point I was starting not to care. There was already one passenger occupying a lower bunk and noisily eating some non-specific meaty substance so I clambered up on to a top billet and lay down in the dampness, my head filled with dreams of Hampstead Heath and a swift half at the Spaniards Inn. I started to drift into unconsciousness …

… only to be woken almost immediately by the sound of Nigel involved in an increasingly heated argument. I clambered back down from the bunk and out into the corridor where Nige was squaring up against a uniformed guard while Yolena stood between them, clutching three rail tickets and bravely attempting to preserve whatever was left of the peace.

The problem, it transpired, was that Nige and I were British, yet our train tickets had been purchased for us by a Russian. Apparently, foreigners were supposed to pay more money for the privilege of travelling on this particular portable toilet, and the guard was now insisting that we hand over more money which he would presumably pocket. Yolena
was level-headedly translating all of this for Nige whose replies were being similarly relayed in the correct language back to the conductor. Through this miracle of multilingual communication skills, Nige was able to understand that the Russian guard wanted to fine him for the crime of being British and the guard was equally able to understand Nige’s forcefully expressed reaction to this apparent cultural apartheid. At the point that I arrived on the scene, Nige was asking Yolena to translate the following phrase: ‘If I pay you any more money, will it make the train go any faster?’

Yolena wasn’t entirely happy about this but Nige wasn’t taking no for an answer. Clearly he was as rattled as I was, which made me feel a bit better; it’s always good to know that somebody else is miserable too – that’s why I like Morrissey so much. So Yolena politely passed on the message to the guard who stared goggle-eyed at Nige’s insolence, his face going various shades of red, white and blue. He seemed to be weighing up the merits of throwing us all off the train, and I was pretty much ready to decamp back to the station and have it out with the cleaner about giving us back our chairs, when suddenly he let out an exasperated gasp, turned, and headed off down the train.

‘I take it that means no,’ said Nige as I ducked back into the cabin, taking refuge once again in the rollicking swallow of the marshy top bunk while the man down below continued to munch contentedly. I really wanted to go home, to be wrapped in the arms of my wife who was surely, even now, making funeral arrangements, certain of my premature demise due to my abject failure to phone her immediately
upon my arrival at Moscow airport all those hours (or was it days?) ago. I drifted in and out of consciousness, too tired to stay awake, too cold and wet to sleep.

And that was pretty much the way I stayed for the next twenty-seven hours. Every now and then I would get up and wander down the corridor a while, staring out of the window at the abyss of featureless flat fields and scrubby settlements which seemed to stretch the entire length of the journey. Baz Luhrmann, the director of
Strictly Ballroom
and
Moulin Rouge
, once proudly boasted to me that his home country Australia had ‘more “nothing” than anywhere else in the world’. Clearly he’d never been to Russia. Or Ukraine, into which we had slipped without really noticing. For hour after hour, an epic vista of nothingness stretched out all around us. And not just nothingness – but
ugly
nothingness. So much for the majestic wheat fields about which we’d all sung so passionately back in the warm pubs of Manchester. The reality was infinitely more miserable than the trouble and pain inspired by a rented room in Whalley Range. God help the Smiths if they’d have been brought up
here
.

Night rolled into day and back into night with little discernible change. The train lurched slowly across ill-maintained tracks, and every now and then the evil stink-beast would escape from its toilet imprisonment and rampage down the corridors and into the cabins like a mustard-gas attack. My insides heaved and groaned and occasionally my outsides followed suit. I was no fun to be around at all.

Somewhere in the middle of it all I started to develop
a pain in the small of my back which spread slowly up my spine to the base of my neck and then up round the back of my head, finally settling between my eyes and ears like a perambulating tumour. I had noticed that when I stood up I was standing neither straight nor proud, and I was starting to doubt that my hunched demeanour was entirely a result of my parlous psychological state. In short, I thought I might not be putting it on, but might actually have done something
not good
in the region of my coccyx. Sadly, I’d downed my entire supply of both aspirin and paracetamol and was now discovering what it must have been like to be alive before the invention of analgesics. It was not pleasant.

I half slept some more and attempted to prepare myself for the coming adventures in Odessa. Surely that would be thrilling? We could walk up the infamous Odessa steps, dodging the ghosts of the tsars’ jackbooted warriors and saving babies in prams as they spiralled ever downward toward a vast fleeing crowd. The fact that the stair-bound civilian massacre portrayed in Eisenstein’s
Battleship Potemkin
never really happened (but was ‘inspired by real events’) mattered not one jot. In our world films
were
fact. So, we’d pay homage to Uncle Sergei and then proceed to the historic film studios where a well-stocked canteen and welcoming toilet facilities would surely await. Duly refreshed (physically, mentally and politically) we would proceed to conduct a string of insightful interviews relating to
Dark Waters
, getting down to the business of proper in-depth ‘on-set’ reportage which was, after all, our reason for being here. Surely things were about to get better?

Sadly, not.

The train pulled into Odessa station, as our guide had promised, first thing in the morning, and somehow (I forget exactly how) we managed to shuffle our way across town to the Odessa studios. They were, as advertised, both impressive and historic, and it would have been terrific to interview Mariano about working here on his first feature film. Predictably, however, Mariano and his crew were nowhere to be seen, having already gone on ahead to the location at Feodosiya, leaving behind only the remnants of
Dark Waters
techies and the decaying leftovers of papier-mâché sets and special effects.

Peculiarly, despite having been advertised as an ‘Odessa Studio’ production, the
Dark Waters
team didn’t actually appear to have been
in
the studios. According to Mariano’s current website (which pays testament to the bizarre conditions endured by
Dark Waters
‘survivors’) someone ‘sold their allotted studio space in Odessa to a rival production for profit, leaving Baino and his crew with no alternative but to move to another studio near Chernobyl’. This new studio was in Kiev Oblast, about seventeen kilometres away from the defunct nuclear reactor which had famously melted down in 1986, scattering poisonous radiation amongst the surrounding lands. It was within this toxic fallout zone that the
Dark Waters
team had been labouring, their make-up woman carrying a Geiger counter to check for fallout between shots.

Meanwhile, back in Odessa, the only evidence of
Dark Waters
’ presence was a set built within a derelict swimming pool just
outside
the main studios, where a climactic flood
scene had recently been shot. Here were the rapidly rotting remains of the crypt-like sets which would be intercut with location footage of the celebrated Odessa Catacombs, thousands of kilometres of underground labyrinths in which Ukrainian partisans had famously hidden during World War Two. And here, too, was the long-awaited demon monster’s head of which Mariano had talked so animatedly back in Pizza Express; terrifying when described by the vibrantly ebullient Baino, but oddly unimpressive when viewed in the harsh light of a grey Odessa dawn.

This was no surprise – almost
all
horror movie monsters look tacky when seen in the raw, and before the application of sexual lubricants. Ask any SFX guy and they’ll tell you that the only way to make monsters look good on screen is to smear them with K-Y Jelly and get a good cameraman to backlight them in a manner which catches the oozing sheen of slime in evocative close-up – very much like porn in fact. And it’s not just low-budget shockers whose creatures lack the X-factor in the flesh. I once interviewed Italian special-effects whiz Carlo Rambaldi who did the extending mandible head effects for Ridley Scott on
Alien
, and the models he showed me (which looked so terrifying on screen) all looked laughably Tony Hart-like in the flesh. At one point the great Rambaldi disappeared off into his workshop and came back lugging a rotting lump of brown Styrofoam with what looked like a load of battery-operated Meccano hanging out of its insides. Two rotating poles were attached to big bulgy eyeballs which seemed oddly familiar, but I couldn’t quite place where I’d seen them before.