For a film about the confrontation between man and nature in the broadest sense, we needed an exceptional shooting location. In search of the right place, I travelled to the Urals, Karelia and Altai. In some places the forest wasn’t right; in others, the winter weather was too unpredictable or there was nowhere to accommodate the crew. Only in Altai did I find everything we needed.
The hunting hut, where an important episode of the film takes place, resembles a kind of survival machine. There is nothing unnecessary inside: just solid walls, a stove and sleeping bunks. So I focused on textures. For example, I took the colours for the log walls from the rocks the hut was built against. In its construction, the hut became almost an extension of the rock itself, and in this way no longer seemed to belong to civilization.
The main difficulty in finding the right village was that I wanted the houses to stand apart rather than close together. Surrounded by mountains, local people naturally tend to build on flat ground. I had to look at more than twenty villages before finding one where the houses descended along the slope, the sun set in the right direction, and there were enough interesting camera positions.
At the very beginning of pre-production, we built full-scale frameworks to establish the dimensions of the sets. This allowed us to rehearse the main camera movements. We needed to make sure there was enough space for the crew, without making the sets look unrealistically large.
Hunting is murder. It was important to somehow suggest the smell of death lingering inside the hunting hut. I thought that a subtle greasy sheen on the surfaces might create this feeling. We tried everything, even coating the walls and floor with vegetable oil.
