The director was the victim of a misunderstanding.
Barely graduating from VGIK, Nikita Mikhalkov decided to put on the picture “At home among strangers, a stranger among his own” and for the sake of an ambitious eastern went to the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. But filming in the Caucasus nearly cost Mikhalkov his freedom.
The fact is that the director decided to recruit extras to work on some scenes. In the local newspaper, he published an ad in which he wrote down the main requirements for a part-time job.
“Come with a passport, equestrian – 10 rubles a day, walking – five”, — was stated in the note.
The locals misunderstood the director. They decided that they themselves needed to pay for the role in the film, so they put the necessary bills in the documents.
At first, the scandal was hushed up, but after some time the party learned about the incident. Officials called Mikhalkov and almost sent him to prison: by some miracle, the director managed to prove that he was not trying to cash in, but became a victim of a misunderstanding. As a result, he was lucky, and he was able to continue working on the film, which glorified him throughout the USSR.
