Directors don’t like winter and children
When I was studying at the director courses Nikita Mikhalkov used to tell me: “Remember, if you opened a script and saw a word “winter” written there you should close it immediately – it’s difficult to shoot. And also you should close it if you saw a word “children””. But I didn’t took his advice. I opened a script and saw “a boy” – and I decided to behave counter to my teacher’s instructions.
The main difficulty is that you can pose a problem to an actor, but you can’t do the same with a kid. Concerning children, on the one hand, you should work on a principle of provocation. But on the other hand, if you find an organic kid, that it will be great. As mature actors say, it’s very difficult to act with kids and dogs because they overact you.
In the beginning it’s was pretty hard – the boy seemed to grow into a role very slow. But then he warmed up so much that the whole crew couldn’t stop him.

Do search for a boy
First, everything seemed to go very smooth: I had got a good script from my study-mate, which then we joyfully corrected together. But after I had begun looking for a leading part kid-actor and had examined about 550 boys, I became desperate. Two weeks before shootings I rushed to children-camps in hysteria… But then my assistant recalled an unusual boy – Valya Zeyfer. Despite the fact that at first I didn’t like him very much we invited him to shoot and then we found out that he had already had some acting experience before. The first shootings day showed that we had made the right choice.

The childhood is slipping away, the time of fees comes
The awkward age between childhood and adolescence is very important. Not a boy, not yet a man. There is a term in psychology – dying of a childhood – when they begin to look different at the world around. This is the idea of the film.
According to a plot, a boy had to dance. Obviously, it’s impossible to teach dance well in a short time, but Valya managed to learn some moves. Dance is not the most important thing – it’s only an image – an image of desire, of striving for something. I think that most essential for a person is a desire. It was important to show that boy had a striving for art, for creativity, for something beautiful.
By the way, despite his young age Valya is the main “getter” in his family. I asked him how he would spent his first money. He told that he would buy a mobile phone for himself and the rest will go for family’s needs.