"Terrible sweater! We need to act in it»: how the films "Brother" and "Brother 2" were created»

In the 90s, the state was full of more important concerns than the cinema. Therefore, projects that were still approved received ridiculous funding. For the filming of the film "Brother" Alexey Balabanov was allocated only one hundred thousand dollars. Nevertheless, the movie turned out to be excellent, and Danila Bagrov, who is looking for justice in a world where bandits rule, instantly became a hero of the time. The sequel was decided to shoot after Sergei Bodrov received a letter in which a woman asked him how to cope with the bandits.

Director Balabanov noticed a young Sergei Bodrov in 1996 at the Kinotavr film Festival. They became friends and decided to make a movie about a man who is not used to going with the flow. 

Bodrov spoke about his hero: 

With a painting budget of a hundred thousand dollars, it was necessary to save literally everything. In fact, the money was spent only on film and shooting equipment. The actors ' fees were minimal, they were rented from each other in apartments and dachas, and their clothes were mostly selected from their own wardrobes. The famous stretched sweater, in which the main character flaunts, was bought in a second-hand store for 35 rubles.

Speaking of the Nautilus concert. It was a real concert, but not by Butusov, but by the group "Chizh & So" in the Moscow recreation center of Gorbunov. The audience was used as extras, and Bodrov and Pismichenko squeezed into the crowd and were filmed without duplicates.

Balabanov generally strove for maximum realism in everything. Yuri Kuznetsov, for example, was filmed surrounded by real homeless people. And they believed that Kuznetsov was one of them.

A year after the premiere, Bodrov received a letter from a woman from the province.

Initially, Balabanov wanted to shoot two new parts-about the adventures of Danila Bagrov in Moscow and Chicago. But he quickly changed his mind and decided to combine them into one film. The budget has grown significantly and exceeded a million dollars.

In the fall of 1999, when they were shooting "Brother 2", in Moscow, after a series of explosions of residential buildings, there was a very tense situation. All the police were on their feet: they were looking for terrorists, checking every second car. They also stopped the van that was carrying the props from Mosfilm. And there are several bags full of weapons. Hardly justified.

After this incident, the actors who starred in the battle scenes no longer had to portray extreme concern and wariness — the feelings were genuine. All the shooting scenes were prepared with the utmost care in order to shoot in one take.

It was not easy to find a free cell in the prison, where the plot turns out to be the hero of Bodrov. The existing ones were overcrowded, and the monkey houses were not suitable for the police. The administrators were knocked off their feet, but they didn't find anything suitable. Then the producer Sergey Selyanov remembered the former guardhouse of the Moscow commandant's office, where he once sat. And before him-Beria before the execution and Trotsky. They took it off there.

The Americans almost refused to cooperate with the Russians when they learned that they were not only going to shoot without stuntmen, but also expect to use real police officers in the film. In the US, this is prohibited. But the producers managed to get together with the cops from a small town in Long Island, and they allowed them to film themselves, official cars, and also, in violation of all instructions, opened cameras where prostitutes, some rumpled homeless people and drug addicts were stuck.

Another interesting case occurred when it was necessary to make a samopal, from which Danila shoots at blacks. The American prop man was asked to find something similar,but he just spread his hands. Then the operator Sergey Astakhov took a Swiss knife, pliers and made this samopal in an hour. The American flatly refused to guarantee safety during the filming of this episode.

At the box office, "Brother 2" did not pay for itself. Movie theaters collected a little more than six hundred thousand dollars. But at the end of 2000, the film took the first place in the number of copies sold on VHS cassettes, beating several expensive American blockbusters.