Some of the greatest science fiction films ever made did not start with a screenwriter. They started with a book.
The film publication Collider recently ranked the ten greatest sci-fi movies based on books. The list included some titles that will ring a bell: Blade Runner from 1982, The Thing, also from 1982, and the 2006 film Children of Men.
But the film that landed at the very top of the list is one you might not have seen. It is a Soviet film from 1979 called Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It holds a perfect 100 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The screenplay was written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, two brothers who based it on their own 1972 novel, Roadside Picnic. That said, Tarkovsky was quick to point out just how different the book and the film really are.
In a 1979 interview with Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra, Tarkovsky said the two works share almost nothing in common. “The screenplay of Stalker has only two words, two names, in common with the Strugatskys’ novel Roadside Picnic: Stalker and Zone,” he explained.
The film almost belonged to someone else entirely. Tarkovsky said he had originally suggested the novel to his friend, director Georgy Kalatozishvili, thinking it might interest him. Kalatozishvili could not reach an agreement with the Strugatsky brothers, though, and walked away from the project.
That is when the idea started coming back to Tarkovsky himself. He told Guerra that he began to see a film built around what he called the classic Aristotelian unities: a single place, a concentrated span of time, and one clear action.
“These classic Aristotelian unities, it seemed to me, allow one to arrive at authentic cinema,” he said. He wanted the story to express what he called the philosophy and condition of the contemporary intellectual.
Tarkovsky died in 1986 at the age of 54. But the film he made that year, the one that almost never happened, is still being talked about and celebrated more than four decades later.
If Stalker has been sitting on your list, this might be the nudge to finally watch it.