Trivia for
Solyaris (1972) More at IMDbPro »

• The movie is based on the novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem.
  
  
• A number of sources claimed that Soviet officials withheld the 165-minute version from export. Mosfilm did indeed issue this version for export, and subtitled prints were being shown in the United States in 1973.
  
  
• This was the most widely seen of Andrei Tarkovsky's films outside of the Soviet Union. However, Tarkovsky himself reportedly considered it the least favorite of the films he directed.
  
  
• A print was screened at the Cinema Village theater in New York City in the mid-1980s that combined an English-dubbed version of the film with sequences from a Russian-language print. This version also featured cheesy 1970s-era titles. Around this time, this was considered the most complete version of the film available in the United States. It was not until the re-opening of New York's Film Forum theatre in 1989 that the complete and uncut Russian-language version was shown there theatrically.
  
  
• The extended scene following Berton as he rides back to the city was filmed in Osaka and Tokyo. Foreign travel was not easily approved, and the reason this long scene was left in the movie was probably to justify that trip for the director and crew. A Japanese city circa 1970 may not look very futuristic to modern audiences, but its impression on Soviet viewers at that time of the film's release was probably quite different. Tarkovski's diary reveals that they just missed the World's Fair, and they may have planned to shoot footage at it that would have looked far more futuristic.
  
  
• In Kris Kelvin's room, it is possible to see an icon painted by Andrei Rublev, the Russian painter who inspired Tarkovsky's Andrey Rublyov (1966).
  
  
• It is quite common to hear this film compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), however, Tarkovsky had not seen that film before shooting Solaris. When he did get round to seeing 2001, he criticised it for being "sterile".
  
  
• Stanislaw Lem was scathing of the adaptation of his novel, and complained that he did not write it about people's "erotic problems in space."
  
  

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