Having premiered on the Ukrainian television, The Sniffer series was immediately taken in by the audience in Ukraine and abroad. Several years have passed, and now this creation of FILM.UA studio can absolutely become a part of the list our country is recognized by all over the world, somewhere between Shevchenko, Klichko and Maidan; the rights to demonstrate the original version were acquired by more than 60 countries.
While the Japanese are only becoming aware of the artistic value of the series born from an idea by Artem Litvinenko, the Ukrainians can look down on them and get ready for the third season. Just to remind you: the filming started in summer, but I couldn’t get to the set earlier due to some objective reasons: first, you always need to give the group some time to warm up, and second, the project’s geography has expanded so much that as soon as the film crew broke the traditional plate in Kiev they immediately departed for Estonia. And as the Baltic climate in autumn is not the best option ever, I decided to wait until The Sniffer and company come back to the Ukrainian capital. And this day has come: Intercontinental, a hotel in Kyiv, transformed into a shooting set for Kirill Kyaro and Ivan Oganesyan to uncover yet another (this time international) crime.
The main thing is not to forget to change paintings in the hall: in the real Intercontinental, they show views of Kyiv; in the episode’s Amsterdam Hotel, they portray Tallinn.
To tell the truth, I expected to see The Sniffer on the set in the familiar suit and coat over it, or at least in jeans.
But Kirill Kyaro can take you by surprise. A pizza delivery guy – this is something new.
Ivan Oganesyan keeps up with his colleague.
Yes, you got it right: according to the episode’s plot, the main characters work undercover in a prestigious Tallinn hotel.
You can’t go in unarmed. For The Sniffer, nose filters are enough.
Now Oganesyan’s character is the one responsible for smells – and he demonstrates it rather convincingly. Meanwhile, Kyaro proves that his charm is still with him, more than enough for a chambermaid.
If the description of a scene for a detective series contains words “undercover”, you are to expect some serious film action. I was lucky to see it twice, but let us stick to the chronology.
First, the film crew occupied a hotel room where The Sniffer is to directly face the killer
Behind the scenes, the evil actor turned out to be a perfectly nice person
But according to the plot he was to slightly injure Kyaro’s character on the throat. Fortunately, they will show it on the screen using makeup.
No matter how cute the Estonian “killer” may be, the knife is still sharp. Kirill’s hand had it tough, but the makeup artists are able to hide real wounds just as skillfully as they paint fake ones.
No worries: Kyaro is safe and sound and didn’t even start slacking off from the filming of the following scene.
Fortunately, you don’t have to go far – just from the room into the corridor
And he is only minimally involved there:
Now Oganesyan will have to take it all – he’ll even have to fight the same killer
It wouldn’t hurt to warm up before the fight
and boast your stretching skills in front of each other
At least Ivan has a cool uniform
It is important to listen to the advice of stunt coordinator
The recommendations from director Artem Litvinenko would also come in handy
Anton Fursa has it easy; he’s done with his DOP task, and now he only has to look after the camera
If you, remembering the injured Kyaro, are worried sick about Oganesyan, I’ll calm you down: the most complicated elements were drilled before the fight on a stunt double
As for the actor, they toned him up well. Just in case – one incident on the set is enough.
Still, the main victim would be not him but the pizza box. You know it all: if there is a gun hanging on the wall, it will surely shoot
Cardboard box defense is a whole discipline which should probably be mastered by each actor
The main thing is to have plenty of training material at hand
Right at the last moment Ivan wanted to get out of the fight and offered the killer to dance tango. Personally, I wouldn’t be able to resist, but this guy was a toughie
And then came some serious arm-swinging!
He even put Ivan down!
Looks like Litvinenko is happy
And everything ended in a winning grip
No, everything ended the way it ends at parties – by the arrival of the police. It also turned out to be Estonian police according to the plot.
If there are people from different countries on the set, language difficulties are sure to arise. This cute interpreter on the photo takes great care for the Estonian actors to understand everything the director tells them
Having had enough action and waited for Litvinenko to get off work, I came up to the director to find out all the secrets and intrigues of the season to come. Artyom turned out to be a hard nut to crack but still shared something.
- Could you first tell me about the team of the third season? As far as I know, Graham Frake, the British DOP, was substituted for Anton Fursa – why?
- Graham wasn’t available to work with us on the third season because he was engaged with a project in London. That is why we decided to take on board a totally new DOP who would also like to film series according to the standards we set for ourselves previously. This is how our team had a great addition in the person of Anton Fursa.
- Did you tell him to work exactly like Graham did, or does he have some freedom of expression?
- Starting from the first season, we have developed a certain style of the series, and the main task is not to depart from it. But this style doesn’t only include photography; these are also locations, the work of artists and costume designers, etc. I simply looked at Anton’s previous works and liked them. So it is more about taste. Even though he didn’t have experience in a big series, I decided to take this risk. Besides, I never intervene into experts’ work, I don’t restrict their creativity. Of course, we can discuss lighting aspects, some references, but I’ll never order around an equipment setup. If I did this, it would mean that I chose a bad DOP. But in this case it is not so.
- Were there any other changes at key posts?
- We have a rather big team, about 80 people. Naturally, it is very hard for the same configuration to get together in the course of five years. Somebody gets new projects to work on, someone is simply unavailable – long story short, there is some totally natural reshuffle. But the backbone holds: costume designers, makeup artists, dolly grips, the editor. The artist is the same we had for season two; that’s Peter, it is very interesting to work with him and I am glad he has managed to join us this year.
- You were saying that the third season won’t be as gloomy as the second. Why?
- We wanted to make it lighter… Actually, it is hard to avoid gloom in a detective story: no matter what you do, the murders, blood and investigation are there to stay. But there is always a choice in how far you go to create the ambience. We really wanted to make season two gloomy, and we managed really well. Now we want to bring back more humor, delve deeper in the relationships among characters and develop them.
- Judging by what we already know, this season will be more lyrical, so to say.
- Yes, it is true. I didn’t think of it as lyrical, but you can probably call it that. In general, we’ll find out a bit more about our character, especially about The Sniffer himself. It just works out this way that it is hard to reveal a character during the detective story: mostly he is busy with investigation and not much time is left for showing his nature. But we’ll try to tell more about The Sniffer during the breaks between investigations and sometimes even during those.
- And the audience won’t be left without a romantic line, right?
- Right. There will be a new romantic line, and The Sniffer will have to deal with all of his… I almost said more I should have (smiling). So I put a full stop here.
- Will we see any new key characters?
- There will be one for sure, but I can’t tell you for now who he is. Or even who plays him because it is among the main intrigues of the new season.
- You were saying that you are trying to involve as many Ukrainian actors as possible, instead of international A-list celebrities. Why?
- This year we are really basing our work on Ukrainian actors, looking for new faces in the regions. We have a great casting director Alla Samoylenko, and I am very grateful to her for the idea of this trip. We made raids on big cities, so to speak – Dnipro, Kharkiv, Odessa, and conducted castings. I think we’ll be able to pleasantly surprise the audience with some not really popular but still solid actors. Because at this market a sort of vacuum has emerged: there are top 20 actors who participate almost in all Ukrainian film and TV projects, and there is an impression they are the only ones. Of course I am happy for these people, I can understand them. On the other hand, the viewer probably won’t like seeing the same actor in the role of a doctor, a detective and a robber in the films shown at the same time, even on different TV channels. That is why we decided to discover new faces: the more there are, the better it is for everyone.
- Where do you source inspiration for coming up with tangled cases for the third season when many things have already been used? Do you study crime chronicles?
- You know, we used to do it, but the practice has shown that it is totally unproductive. As a rule, there are no interesting things in crime chronicles: 99 per cent of cases are banal household crimes. So the only thing left for us to do is to come up with everything ourselves (laughs). Sometimes there are allusions to real-life loud cases as in the second season, but mostly they are the product of our imagination.
- Could you please tell me about the locations for the season? Some filming was made in Tallinn, and now you came back to Kyiv. How are you going to surprise your audience?
- A lot has been filmed in Kyiv, including our series, so it is hard to find something new. But we are trying to do it for the third time, and if the fourth season is approved I don’t know what we are going to look for then (smiles). Sometimes it happens that we develop a script for a certain setting: I know there is an interesting site and we start musing what can happen there. And Tallinn will become a high-contrast spot for this season.
- By the way, why Tallinn?
- It is motivated by the new central character and the main plot line of the third season. The only thing I can say now is this: it is connected with The Sniffer’s past.
- Recently there was a nasty story with Castle series; its episode was really similar to The Sniffer’s plot. Were there any developments?
- Yes, it did happen: I don’t know whether Castle borrowed our idea or not, but there were lots of similar features. Besides, it weirdly coincided with the start of The Sniffer’s popularity in the West. Whether this story had any developments – quite honestly, I don’t know because I didn’t follow it.
- And finally, have you seen the Japanese Sniffer? How did you like it?
- I saw an excerpt because now I literally don’t have time for anything except our third season. Well, I watched in full confidence it was episode one, and it turned out to be episode two – in Japanese language, with Japanese subtitles. So I can’t say anything for now (laughs).
Now you know you shouldn’t worry about season three of the project. And as a lot of time is left until the end of shooting and the premiere, I’ll surely drop by Litvinenko and company a couple more times. We all have to pass the time somehow before the season is broadcast by ICTV in 2017.
Photos by Kirill Avramenko, FILM.UA press service
