2023-10-26 22:49:44
The founder and owner of the production company Profit, Igor Tolstunov, is one of those people whose names are associated with the history of new domestic cinema. In 1990, together with Valery Todorovsky and Sergei Livnev, he created one of the first private Russian companies, TTL, which, in particular, produced Todorovsky’s “Love” and Vasily Pichul’s “Idiot’s Dreams.”
From 1995 to 2005, he headed the film part of Vladimir Gusinsky’s media empire – the NTV-Profit studio, which, even during the period of low film production – the second half of the nineties and the beginning of the 2000s – regularly supplied high-profile projects to the market. Including the Oscar-nominated film “The Thief” by Pavel Chukhrai, “Three Stories” by Kira Muratova, the popular hits “The Orphan of Kazan” by Vladimir Mashkov and “The Voroshilov Shooter” by Stanislav Govorukhin.
It was Tolstunov who discovered directors Oksana Bychkova and Valeria Gai Germanika, becoming the producer of their debut films “Peter FM” and “Everyone will die, but I will stay,” respectively. “There is a freshness in their work that you don’t often see in cinema, and that’s what attracts me,” he says about working with debutants.
Tolstunov is also actively producing TV series. The explanation for the increasing number of TV series in his filmography is simple: as the producer says, it is now difficult to find budgets for large-scale audience films, since cinema is “not the zone that attracts investors.”
Nevertheless, already in January 2024, the film “The Master and Margarita” will be released, the budget of which is 1.2 billion rubles. In order to film such a high-budget film adaptation of the famous novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, it took the efforts and investments of three film companies at once – Mars Media, Amedia, Profita and two funds – the private Kinoprime, the state Cinema Fund.
Producer Igor Tolstunov discusses in an interview how to make a big audience film and attract audiences to small art projects, as well as what is good when a director has “a certain degree of stubbornness” and why a film industry has not yet developed in Russia. Vedomosti”.
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