This LA director made a film in Russia. The Kremlin wasn't happy. Then came death threats
LOS ANGELES — Soon after Russian tanks crashed into Ukraine, Michael Lockshin realized he was making a dangerous movie. The director had spent 69 days, and $15 million, filming "The Master and Margarita" in Russia and Croatia, and now he was in Los Angeles beginning postproduction.
With just one previous feature to his name, Lockshin had been entrusted with a cultural treasure — adapting a complicated modernist novel as beloved to Russians as "The Catcher in the Rye" is to Americans.
He'd co-written the script, focusing on the tragic love story between a writer in Stalinist Russia and his devoted paramour. A veiled chronicle of novelist Mikhail Bulgakov's relation to a totalitarian Kremlin that banned his work, the Russian-language movie would be a satire, a paean to creative freedom, and a surrealist revenge fantasy that culminates in the burning of Moscow.
Lockshin, who was born in America but raised in Russia, thought he was making a fable about a nightmarish past. Then came the war, and the criminalization of even mild dissent. As Lockshin continued editing the footage in an apartment off La Brea, the film that was emerging seemed to have strikingly timely echoes.
In Vladimir Putin's increasingly fearful, the film's fate became uncertain. Would it ever be finished, much less allowed to open? With so many voices silenced, might buying a ticket be a quiet act of rebellion?
