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Originally released at the end of the 1980s, The Long Way Home documented a singular cultural moment: Soviet underground rock legend Boris Grebenshchikov recording in the West during the brief, hopeful era of Glasnost. Decades later, the film has been painstakingly remastered and expanded from the only surviving 16mm print. Producer Steven Lawrence, who supervised the restoration alongside original editor Susanne Rostock, spoke with VENTS about rescuing a nearly lost film, revisiting history through a modern lens, and why music still matters.
Resurrecting a Lost Rock Film From The Only Surviving Print!
VENTS: So the first question is, The Long Way Home was rebuilt from the only surviving 16mm print, correct?
Steven Lawrence: Correct.
VENTS: So what condition was that print in when you began, and was it challenging working with it?
Steven Lawrence: Yes. I don’t want to get too technical, but this was a release print. We made a couple of prints to screen the film at film festivals. All those years ago there wasn’t digital cinema. You went to a film festival, you had to have a film print.
We shot on film, but we finished it on tape. So the film was initially released on videotape, standard definition. Today, one of those standard-definition tapes, even if you upscaled it to 4K, would not look very good. So the print was the best source that we had.
A release print, by definition, is more contrasty than a negative, and the negative didn’t exist anymore. It was lost by one of the rights owners over the years, moving storage locations and whatever.
The print wasn’t beaten up. There was some dust and dirt. There were some scenes that were too contrasty. So it was a challenge to get the right scan and the right approach. We had to do noise reduction. There are various tricks in remastering films now from old sources.
There were some scenes we actually took from tape and upscaled, but Susanne Rostock, the editor of the original film, helped me. We supervised the remastering together, and we had a brilliant team at a company called Postworks. The colorist, Brian Woos, put his heart and soul into it.
It looks pretty darn good, but it looks like a film. It has some graininess and funkiness, which I think suits it anyway. It’s a rock and roll film.
VENTS: Would it be fair to say that this could have become a lost film if you didn’t go through this process?
Steven Lawrence: Yeah, it was a lost film. It was released on TV in the UK in 1989, I think in the US in 1990. It played in a few other countries. There was a VHS release in North America in 1991. After that, nada.
Boris [Grebenshchikov] didn’t become a superstar. His US label, Sony, wasn’t interested in putting out a DVD of the film, so it just disappeared, except for collectors who were fans of Boris’s work or Michael’s work and wanted a VHS.
But in a 4K world, what is a VHS tape worth? Nothing. It looks terrible. So the only way to resurrect this film was to remaster it.
Expanding the Story
VENTS: What sort of enhancements and expansions did you make to the movie?
Steven Lawrence: On the technical level, we took an analog stereo mix off a master videotape and turned it into 5.1. That was managed and supervised by a wonderful sound mixer named John Bowen.
We made a 4K master from the film print, and then we made an epilogue. Susanne Rostock and I co-directed an epilogue that brings Boris’s story into the present.
What happened to Boris after his American album Radio Silence was released in 1989? It’s a really interesting story. I’m not going to tell it here because I don’t want to spoil it for viewers. He wasn’t able to make a second album for CBS, and he went home to Russia. Then, well, you’ll find out when you watch the epilogue.
One way of putting it is that at one point he was the beneficiary of a change in Russian politics when he was able to come and make the album here. Many years later, after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, he had to deal with something else.
VENTS: The movie captures Boris at a moment when recording in the West suddenly became possible. Looking back now, how do you see that moment differently than when the film was first made?
Steven Lawrence: It is a complex question. At that time, we were all just in the moment. We were riding the excitement of Russia opening up and the possibility of a great Russian artist who had lived landlocked and under censorship suddenly having this opportunity.
We were documenting the excitement of change, the hope for democracy and freedom, and at the same time Boris’s great adventure. We didn’t know what would come of it. We were hopeful.
We knew there were challenges. He was writing in English for the first time. He had never worked with a producer or been in a modern studio. All of this was new to him.
What we couldn’t have anticipated is that this movement toward a democratic future would flip in another direction. From a geopolitical perspective, Russia and some other countries have reverted in a way to autocracy and censorship of artists.
Boris grew up in Soviet times with strict censorship. He matured as an artist, and then once again, he was confronted with censorship and threats to his freedom. That’s part of what the epilogue is about. He’s now living in exile in the UK.
Glasnost, Music, and History
VENTS: For readers who may not fully understand it, what was Glasnost?
Steven Lawrence: Mikhail Gorbachev became premier of Russia in the mid-1980s, and he was determined to change things. Two of the policies he instituted were Glasnost, meaning openness, and perestroika, meaning restructuring.
Glasnost was a thawing of restrictions on freedom of speech, public discourse, artistic expression, and distribution. For the first time, Boris [Grebenshchikov] and his band Aquarium could distribute their music and perform publicly.
They weren’t getting paid much, because everything was still state-controlled. The revenues went back to the state label, Melodiya. But these were big changes. Before that, they couldn’t perform publicly at all.
Their music was distributed on cassettes copied and passed from fan to fan. It was called Magnitizdat, the electronic equivalent of Samizdat, underground literature.
It’s amazing that Boris has lived through these seismic changes in Russian life. His story is very instructive. He’s a resilient artist who has coped brilliantly with opportunity and upheaval. He’s still writing, recording, and performing all over the world.
For Russians living abroad or in exile, he’s a voice for them. As a Westerner, you can think of him in the same league as Bob Dylan, someone whose songs are deeply embedded in people’s hearts and psyche.
So here we have a film about this great artist at a moment of opportunity, and then we revisit him 37 years later. That’s a wonderful gift. We’ve dedicated the film to Michael Apted, who loved longitudinal storytelling, like the 7 Up films. Our epilogue uses some of those techniques, moving between past and present.
VENTS: Do you think there are reasons to be optimistic today, despite everything going on in the world?
Steven Lawrence: Music is not directly the agent of change, but think how impoverished we’d be without great songs that lift us up and inspire us.
Boris is part of that tradition. His songs aren’t overtly political, but they speak to the human condition, to hope and yearning. He says in the epilogue that he still hopes to inspire people the way Revolver and Sgt. Pepper inspired him.
He’s working out of that groove of optimism, hope, and love that’s fundamental to great art.
Collaborations and Legacy
VENTS: Did you get to meet Chrissie Hynde, Annie Lennox, and Dave Stewart? And what was it like working on anti-apartheid projects like Sun City?
Steven Lawrence: It was great working with Dave. He’s a consummate musician and producer. Boris calls him a grandmaster, and he is. Boris learned so much from working with him.
Dave even traveled with the Eurythmics to Russia to perform with Boris and his band, which was not an easy thing to do in those days.
I had met Chrissie previously while making films for MTV. The studio shoot with Chrissie and Annie that appears in the film was supervised by my co-producer Joe Durden-Smith, who has since passed away. He was a wonderful colleague of Michael Apted’s.
As for The Making of Sun City: Artists United Against Apartheid, I was a staff producer and director at MTV. I was always looking for projects that went beyond promoting the most popular artist of the moment, projects that spoke to political change, activism, and different musical genres.
That was a great experience. We filmed with Steve Van Zandt and many others involved in that movement.
Final Thoughts
VENTS: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Steven Lawrence: I’d just say that The Long Way Home is a movie that was lost and has now been resurrected. It’s one of the great rock and roll movies and one of Michael Apted’s best documentaries.
If you love music, or if you’re a fan of his films, you should see this one. We hope it will get distribution in the spring or summer. For now, it’s screening at the Museum of Modern Art on January 28th and 29th in New York City, with more screenings to come. People can go to thelongwayhomefilm.com for more information.
