Воспоминания Майкла Кейна о его съемках в Санкт-Петербурге в 90-х годах 20 века :-)

 "As I’ve said before, I’ve been lucky over my career. Like most people, I’ve screwed up a couple of times and got away with it. What I was about to do almost finished me off. The thing is, it sounded really attractive. I was asked to work with an old friend – the spy Harry Palmer, one of my favourite characters and my first starring role – in two back-to-back sequels to the 1965 film The Ipcress File: Bullet to Beijing and Midnight in St Petersburg.  It turned out to be my worst professional experience ever. Of course like all bad experiences, there were some good things – Jason Connery, Sean’s son, whom I’d met as a small boy and was pleased to meet again, and Marsha, the assistant and interpreter who guided Shakira and me around St Petersburg. (Yes, in my defence, Shakira had agreed to come with me on location.) Marsha was intelligent and melancholic in equal measure, in a very Russian way. She came to work one day with eyes all red from crying. ‘What’s wrong?’ Shakira asked, very concerned. ‘I’ve been crying all night,’ she replied. ‘What for?’ Shakira persisted. She just shrugged her shoulders. ‘We all do,’ she said.

Eighteen years ago and in the immediate aftermath of the fall of communism, St Petersburg was a very different place from the way it is today. It was beyond chaos – and the Mafia had jumped in to the vacuum and taken over. The first lunchtime on the set just before we started filming, we were all given personal Geiger counters to test the food for radiation. The first thing we all did was buy new batteries. Radioactive or not, the food was terrible and Shakira would go back and forth to London, returning to St Petersburg with Marks and Spencer’s steak and kidney pudding and other goodies to keep us all going.

Our hotel turned out to be the centre for the local Mafia. Oddly enough, they didn’t hang out in the dimly lit bar or the disco, but in the central café that only served tea and cakes and played genteel light music. It was a very ladylike place and it was very strange watching some of the toughest men on earth plotting mayhem over afternoon tea and scones.

One afternoon, we were sitting peacefully in the tea room when out of the blue, with no shouting or warning, a dozen men in black overalls and black masks came tearing across the café – not on the floor, but leaping straight across the room, crashing on top of the tables and hurling themselves straight at their target. It was all over in a second, but we were in complete shock. It turned out that what we initially thought was a hit squad of rival gangsters was the elite force of the Russian police – they wore masks so the Mafia could not recognise them and retaliate against their families.

I was eventually assigned a few bodyguards, two guys with Kalashnikovs who followed me everywhere in the street in a jeep and another one with a pistol who apparently was watching over me when I was inside. I never found out who he was, but I took the production manager’s word that he existed and I hung onto those guards right up to the last passenger barrier at the airport. A couple of days before I left, I was sitting in my usual corner of the café (now with the damage repaired) when one of the Mafia guys came over and asked if he could join me. As if I could possibly say no. ‘Why do you have these stupid bodyguards?’ he asked. I replied to him all innocently, as if I had no idea of his occupation, ‘They say that there’s Mafia here in St Petersburg and I’m worried about our safety.’ He let out a great laugh and slapped his enormous thigh. ‘You work for-’ and he gave the name of a Russian movie company I didn’t quite catch. Did I? He stood up and said, ‘We own that. There’s no need to worry – you’re the safest man in the whole of St Petersburg,’ and walked away.

The city architecture of St Petersburg and the Hermitage in particular was fabulous. Shakira and I spent hours wandering around the museum. But the filming itself was a joke. The final blow came when we were shooting in the Lenfilm studio itself. I wanted to go for a pee and they directed me to the toilet. I could smell it fifty yards away and when I got there I found the filthiest toilet I have ever seen in my life. I went outside and peed up against the soundstage, which I noticed several other men had done before. So this is where my career has ended, I thought to myself: in the toilet. I’m done."