Trailer
Plot summary
Near a gray, unnamed city stands the Zone, an alien place fenced off and guarded by soldiers, where the normal laws of physics are said to break down. At its heart lies the Room, which grants a visitor's innermost desires. The guides who know the way in are called Stalkers, and crossing the border can mean prison. Newly released from a long sentence, the Stalker rises early, over his wife's objections, and leaves her and their disabled daughter to meet two clients at a rundown bar-café. One is a popular Writer, burned out and doubting his talent; the other a quiet Professor. Needing the money, the Stalker agrees to take them into the Zone, warning that they must obey him to survive what lies ahead.
Cast
- Evgeniy Kostinas Lyuger, Owner of Cafe
- Raimo Rendias Police Patrol
- E. Kostinas Lyuger, khozyain kafe
- Raymo Rendias Patrulnyy politseyskiy (as R. Rendi)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Stalker (1979)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Production designer Rashit Safiullin recalled that Andrei Tarkovsky spent a year shooting Stalker's outdoor scenes, but when the crew returned to Moscow they found the film had been improperly developed and their footage was unusable.
- Stalker heavily influenced the Cacophony Society, which organised "Zone Trips" from 1986 in the San Francisco Bay Area; the first burning of a wooden man at Nevada's Black Rock Desert happened on "Zone Trip Number 4" in 1990 and grew into the Burning Man festival.
- After the film stock was lost, Soviet film boards wanted to shut Stalker down; Tarkovsky saved the production by asking to make it a two-part film, which brought extra deadlines and more funds, and he reshot almost everything with new cinematographer Alexander Knyazhinsky.
- The film's sound designer recalled that the "snow falling in the summer" seen in Stalker was white foam from a chemical plant pouring poison into the river near the Tallinn shoot, and that many women in the crew got allergic reactions on their faces.
- Composer Eduard Artemyev, who had scored Tarkovsky's Solaris and Mirror, wrote two versions of Stalker's music: the first, for orchestra alone, was rejected by Tarkovsky, and the version used was created on a synthesizer with traditional instruments manipulated through sound effects.
- Boris Strugatsky said "prospectors" and "trappers" were considered before settling on "stalker", a word partly inspired by Rudyard Kipling's character "Stalky"; the authors' calque of the English word came into common usage in Russian.
- The Ukrainian developer GSC Game World's 2007 game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, loosely based on the film, the novel and the Chernobyl disaster, sold over 15 million copies by 2021 and led to two sequels.
- After arguments, Tarkovsky sent his cinematographer Rerberg home and shot Stalker three times, using over 5,000 metres of film; people who have seen Rerberg's version say it is almost identical to the released film.
