On this Father’s Day as you celebrate the father in your life, consider a man who, under house arrest, learns to eschew the trappings of his former life and learns to care for others as a surrogate father. That is one of the many themes within Paramount+’s limited series A Gentleman in Moscow.
Starring Ewan McGregor as Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, the titular gentleman in Moscow, the limited series explores life during the Russian October Revolution and in the decades following as it shifts political trajectories. Given Rostov’s state of being permanently contained to a hotel under house arrest, one of director Sam Miller’s initial concerns was to give the property a sense of vitality, a sense of life that would help the viewers avoid cinematic claustrophobia.
It’s something he does extraordinarily well.
“We worked really hard to find ways to expand that hotel. I really tried to find a kind of mischief in the way the camera moved so you were never quite sure where it was going to take you or where the story was going to take you. The cameras never felt too static,” Miller explained, also attributing the sense of openness to the near-fairytale way he approached Rostov’s flashback sequences to his pre-revolution life.
“The show could go anywhere. The storytelling could go anywhere. That helps a lot in terms of, as a watcher, you’re not feeling limited by the space.”
To tell the story visually, Miller and team were inspired by Russian art of the period. In fact, the main title sequence, Miller explained, is a direct nod to art of the period. They were surprised by and loved how expressionistic and colorful period art really was. Those colors also tended to influence set design as well.
While there were no direct cinematic references, Miller went back to the source novel and its author, Amor Towles, to pull inspiration. The creative team wanted most of all to honor and bring to life the unique world Towles created. That, more than any other source of inspiration, proved to be a guiding light in fashioning A Gentleman in Moscow.
One aspect of Towles’s original source novel that Miller and team wanted to keep in tact was the ending. Both novel and limited series leave the plot resolution up for interpretation with the fates of Rostov and his long-time girlfriend Anna (McGregor’s real-life wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead). ***SPOILER ALERT*** Here, in the limited series, narration provided by Rostov’s adopted daughter Sofia (Beau Gadson) indicates that, after defecting to America, she never found out what happened to Anna and Rostov. Perhaps they escaped and fled Russia. Perhaps they didn’t.
But Miller pulled from a similar approach in Towles’s novel and fashioned an optimistic, fair tale ending for the beleaguered characters.
“We became so excited by the idea of Sofia’s imagination of how they might have lived their lives out, and we were keen to balance the story. We put it on the viewer. What would you like? How would you like the story to end? We opted for that rather than being categorical about the fact that they were quite getting towards the end of the ends of their lives at that point. That was our direction, though, in finding that slightly fairytale ending for the piece.”
A Gentleman in Moscow streams exclusively on Paramount+.