Today I can feel at ease, because we have taken part in so vast a project. What has taken place before my eyes today represents a grandiose attempt to do something, which probably cannot be grasped by the human mind.

I would like to congratulate Alexander Sokurov, particularly as he is someone who also lives in St. Petersburg...With my whole heart I congratulate him and hope that the result will be outstanding, a gift for the 300th anniversary of the foundation of St. Petersburg. That date is very much in our minds all the time, and we are continually preparing ourselves for the celebrations.

The appearance of the city of St. Petersburg and then the appearance there of the Mariinsky Theatre, is like the birth of brother and sister. We are the younger sister, and the city is our elder brother-we are bound by close ties. The beauty of the Hermitage or beauty of the Mariinsky Theatre are but the consequence of the appearance of so unique a city as St. Petersburg, a creative, artistic city.

Sokurov immediately won me over with how serious, how open he is; he somehow talked very trustingly. Which is not selfunderstood, since he didn't really know anything about me. You are immediately struck by how Sokurov relates to his team, to his staff-with those who are closer or less close to him: there is a common style, a common tone, which wins you over straight off. I had the sense that we had known each other for years, a sense of mutual trust. Most importantly, what appealed to me on a purely human level, was that this director respected everyone equally, regardless of their rank, status or role in the process. And he seeks to support each and every one.

And when you first went through the sequence, what did you think?
You know, I didn't have any thoughts in particular. Apart from some feeling inside that I was entering an atmosphere in which the Russian Tsars had walked. People of another world, of another century, of another unattainable status. Which I, a simple mortal, would never have been able to penetrate. Not even come anywhere near it. So I had this kind of inner trepidation, I don't know what to call it. I'm walking across the same floors, touching the same objects, looking at the same walls...And I felt very small, a nonentity.

The second sensation, which arose, was of the vast mass of paintings, and here was all this art which seemed to press down on me. I understood in my head that it is beautiful, that it is magnificent. But I could not see any beauty, I could not identify it behind the single, monolithic mass which immediately crushed me. And it's only now that I can begin to understand those people who come to the Hermitage once a week for half an hour or an hour at a time. I understand how you can really enjoy these objects. And even now I'm amazed by the vast spaces of the Hermitage. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that I can never truly comprehend the whole of this vast mass right to the very end.

I'm no theoretician, I'm a practical director. I have never had any desire to uncover anything new. This idea of the long, unbroken shot has existed for years. I never do anything new...I am interested only in classical form and content. In the professional world, much of the art has been utterly forgotten and therefore my conduct is sometimes seen as radical, but it's simply that I remember a lot... the very fact of art itself is unshakeable; art was perfected long ago. Here, shooting in a single take is an achievement in formal terms, but more than that it is a tool with the aid of which a specific artistic task can be resolved. It's just a tool.

What tool is this?
Breathing. One has to live a specific amount of time in a single breath. Back in the spring of 1999 the producer Audrey Deryabin suggested that I take on a serious production based around the Hermitage collection. He knows my great admiration, my almost reverential attitude to this museum. I had an idea but it was very expensive and complicated to put into effect. This idea was for a film shot, as it were ‘in a single breath'.

The screen format, cinematography- everything depends on the scissors, on the knife. Editors and producers accumulate, then edit using time according to their whims. And I wanted to try and fit myself into the very flowing of time, without remaking it according to my wishes. I wanted to try and have a natural collaboration with time, to live that one and a half-hours as if it were merely breathing in...and out. That was the ultimate, the sole artistic task...

Before this, nobody had ever tried it. In order to make a film in a single breath the many different components within the whole concept have to be in accord with each other, all the different parts have to be linked together, and each must flow from the previous part...one has to grow a tree, as it were. Whenever I'm working on a film I seek to grow a tree. Not a bush, but a tree. That is the principle, which has guided me through many years in the cinema...

Does the action take place in different times?
In different times. The time of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, of Nicholas I and Nicholas II...For me it is all a single temporal space. I live in those times. For me, not one of those times has ever stopped or ended. Historical time cannot depart, cannot collapse. This is a historic feature, in which there are central heroes. Some unknown foreigner, born in the 19th century, who has visited Russia. And another figure, a contemporary figure, the Author. Both find themselves in this situation, moving through a labyrinth. The labyrinth is the Hermitage, the only place in Russia where such a thing exists, for there is no other such artistic and vivid labyrinth.