Did You Know?
The person responsible for extras casting was Jewish and was casting a lot of his friends and relatives in tiny parts. As a result, when the military consultant (from the KGB) saw the chosen actors, he said that most of the guards at Nazi headquarters looked like soldiers of Israeli army, not elite SS soldiers, and demanded that they change them to more appropriate looking actors. As a result, the roles of SS guards were played by military cadets of the frontier-guards schools from Tallinn (Estonia) and Riga (Latvia), who, being tall, blonde and blue-eyed looked more like real SS soldiers.
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The two songs by Édith Piaf, that Stierlitz and Schlag listen to while driving to the border, were actually recorded in the '60s.
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According to Leonid Bronevoy, his tailored uniform shirt was several sizes too small for him, the shirt collar cutting into his neck, making the actor jerk his head. When asked by the film director Tatyana Lioznova on the matter, unwilling to make blame the tailor, the actor said that this was his own way of being nervous. Lioznova then suggested that this should have been featured in the movie in the tensest of scenes.
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Tatyana Lioznova is sure that Stirlitz's part would have "brought glory to any actor. Everything - the plot, the actors - worked for one character, Stirlitz. I told Tikhonov during filming, "Oh, Slava, this role will bring you stardom overnight!"
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When the crew was about to shoot one of the scenes where Stirlitz talks to Pastor Schlag, it turned out Vyacheslav Tikhonov did not know his lines, so the crew gave them to him on paper and he read them up. The scene was shot in four takes although Tikhonov kept glancing at the sheet.
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It was hard for the crew to work with Vyacheslav Tikhonov. He had the highest wages possible for a Soviet actor, 50 rubles a day; as he was also paid for rehearsals, his salary made 75 rubles a day. The filmmakers did not fail to pay him but he thought he was not receiving the complete wages and would sit on the set with a pen and paper, calculating. Tatyana Lioznova, who worked with him a lot, had long conversations with him and kept making sure he was in a good mood, was the only one from the crew who managed to find a common language with him.
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