The Master and Margarita: The Russian box-office hit that criticised the state

"We pitched it as a movie about a writer who is censored… but censorship was not anywhere near where it is today. It's hard to imagine that just three years ago, we were in a very different world." The director of The Master and Margarita describes how the Kremlin-funded film came under attack for being anti-regime – and went on to become a box-office hit in Russia.

They loved him until they didn't. In 2020, Michael Lockshin, an American director who spent most of his childhood in Moscow, was so trusted by Russia's film industry that the state cinema fund contributed 40 per cent of the production money for his film The Master and Margarita, based on Mikhail Bulgakov's classic Stalin-era novel. If Lockshin were to set foot in Russia today, he might be arrested under recent laws that make it a crime to criticise that country's invasion of Ukraine. "They've called me a criminal, they've called me a terrorist on state TV," Lockshin tells the BBC, about the pro-Putin commentators who have attacked him and his film.

The trouble began soon after the invasion took place in February 2022. Lockshin, who was living in Los Angeles and editing the film, posted on social media in support of Ukraine. When the film finally opened in Russia just a few months ago – after a two-year struggle to get it finished and released, and with the director's name taken off any promotional material – the attacks by influential supporters of the Kremlin began.

A large Telegram channel called him a Russiaphobe, and a right-wing group named Call of the People said he should be criminally charged with promoting falsehoods. The television presenter Vladimir Solovyov asked on his show, "How could this unpatriotic film have been authorised?" Another television presenter, Tigran Keosayan, who is married to the head of Russian state television, said there should be an investigation into how the film was produced.

As the Russian producer Ivan Filippov previously told the BBC, "Never in the history of Russian distribution has any film caused such a propaganda reaction." Bulgakov's novel about a writer fighting state oppression in the 1930s now seems like a forecast of Lockshin's own struggle to get his work out in the world. On screen and off, the film Master and Margarita starkly reflects the fraught situation of artists in Stalin's era and in Russia today.

Lockshin was five years old in 1986 when his family moved to what was then the Soviet Union. His father said he was being harassed by the FBI because of his communist sympathies, and the family's arrival made it a cause celebre in Moscow. After going to university in Moscow, Lockshin began splitting his time between the US and Russia, and moved to Los Angeles in 2021. His first feature, Silver Skates (2020), based on the children's story Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, was successful in Russia and the first Russian language original for Netflix.

Part of the canon

Bulgakov's epic novel is more widely admired than read outside Russia, but its fans include Patti Smith and Mick Jagger, who used it as inspiration for The Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil. Like many Russian-educated people, Lockshin read the book when he was young, and was taken with its swirl of romance, absurdist comedy and social commentary, which includes: a visit by the devil to Moscow, accompanied by a cat the size of a toddler; a love affair between an unnamed writer called the Master and his muse, the beautiful but married Margarita, along with sections of a novel the Master is writing about Jesus and Pontius Pilate, which implicitly criticises the Soviet authorities.

When Russian producers asked Lockshin to pitch an idea for adapting the unwieldly book, he and his co-writer, Roman Kantor, decided to focus the story by merging Bulgakov's own troubles with the Master's. Bulgakov's plays were once praised and later banned by Stalin. He started The Master and Margarita in 1928, revising until just before he died, in 1940. Understanding that his novel could not be published under Stalin, he never tried. A censored version first appeared in a Russian magazine in 1966.  

Despite the movie's anti-authoritarian theme, Lockshin says he was not worried about political backlash when he started on the project in 2020. He says, "We pitched it as a movie about a writer who is censored, even more so than in the book, a writer who's censored in Stalin's '30s, very much about censorship, repressions, purges and terror of the Stalin era. We were very conscious that those themes were relevant for Putin's Russia at that time, but censorship was not anywhere near where it is today. It's hard to imagine that just three years ago, we were in a very different world."

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The film itself is an engaging, ambitious mix of politics and fantasy, at times reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, yet also rooted in the realism of the Master's struggle against the state. Here the Master (Yevgeny Tsyganov) is a playwright whose work about Pilate is shut down by the authorities. The film includes full-scale musical numbers brought to life from the page, and Margarita (Yulia Snigir) presiding as Queen of the Night at the Devil's phantasmagorical midnight party. Claes Bang (Bad Sisters) has a small role as Pilate, and August Diehl (Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life) has a major role as the Devil.

For all of 2022, the film was in what Lockshin describes as "a limbo period", as the fallout of the invasion raised questions about its release. Universal International, which had been planning to distribute the film in Russia, pulled out of the country along with many other Western film companies. More chillingly, the new Russian laws went into effect, one of them carrying up to 15 years in prison for spreading so-called "false information". Lockshin says that his Russian producers told him at the time, "You realise that you're now going to be a criminal," simply based on his pro-Ukraine posts.

And as real-world politics changed, the film became more volatile than anyone could have predicted. In a scene invented for the film, the Master is called before a tribunal at the Writers Union, a sort of show trial. His critics attack his anti-Stalinist play about Pilate in terms that mirror how Lockshin's film obliquely comments on Russia today. "He hides behind a period piece to undertake a harsh critique of the Soviet Union," the Master's opponents charge.

The scene, Lockshin says, was based on historical transcripts of Stalin-era trials, but "As we were editing the movie, those scenes were becoming more and more timely almost in a mystical way." Other lines leap out with contemporary resonance, including some straight from the novel. In both versions, Jesus (called Yeshua) says "A new temple of truth will be built," and Pilate replies "What is truth?"  The exiled Russian film critic Anton Dolin told The New York Times, "The film amazingly coincided with the historical moment that Russia is experiencing."

Why the film was finally released is a matter of speculation, which Lockshin offers with the caveat, "Someday, hopefully somebody tells us for real", because he has gotten no official explanation. He assumes that because Russian money was used, suppressing the film would have been an embarrassment. And there had been a flurry of publicity about the film even before it started shooting, so anticipation was already high.

On its release, it drew large and enthusiastic audiences. A Russian film producer reported that when he saw the film much of the audience cheered afterwards. He said, "People are happy they are able to experience and watch this film that has this clear anti-totalitarian and anti-repressive-state message." In the midst of such positive responses, "withdrawing the film would have caused too much unrest", Alexander Rodnyansky told Vanity Fair. So far the film, which reportedly cost $17 million, has earned $26 million at the box office in Russia, a huge amount for that country and many times what anyone expected.

The film does not yet have distribution outside Russia. It's hard enough for any unconventional foreign language film, but The Master and Margarita has extra legal issues. "We've been trying to get all the rights out of Russia, so the international sales would be separate," Lockshin says. He thinks the producers are close to ironing that out so they can begin talking to distributors in Europe and the US.

Permanently settled in Los Angeles, Lockshin says he does not feel like an exile because he has always had a connection to both the US and Russia. "I'm sad, of course, that I won't be able to go back in any foreseeable future," he says. And he now says of the head-spinning way the Russian establishment turned against him, "It was very ironic and very funny in a way as well, but also scary. It was a mix of all these emotions. But you know, I kept on thinking about how Bulgakov would be looking at this, and he would just be laughing his head off."

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