What do you think of your character, Vassily?
He is symbolic of Russia at the time, but he is also an everyman in any time, in any conflict. It's the idea of this individual being taken from his home and put into a conflict, a war situation where it's life or death. He transcends the period of the movie and is as relevant today as he is then. People in the past have been plucked from their homeland and told to fight for the greater good without being told what the greater good is. In that sense, Vassily is quite the essential everyman in battle. His journey from that to become a soul-sapped war veteran was a hell of a challenge.
What preparation did you do?
I underwent a lot of training to be an authentic sniper. I studied camouflage, military approach, and how to handle the weapon, and then I arrived here, put on the fatigues and realised that none of that had anything to do with anything. It was good for my brain but once I got out there and met the young Germans and Russians who all had stories of their relatives in this battle. You heard it from the heart, you saw it in their eyes. Then I got used to the fact that I couldn't feel my fingers and my feet. That for me was the essence of the battle. It was nothing to do with what the history books say, whose right or wrong. It was all about people suffering, really, and the intensity of friendship and relationships, and love under the strain of war.
Was Vassily really such a sharpshooter?
There was a story in his memoirs that he shot a wolf in the eye from over half a mile away. He was an incredible marksman. I've met guys who said that was possible. They could read the wind, the levitation of the land, how the temperature would affect the speed of the bullet. An incredible gift, but a fatal gift, a gift that is turned against him, almost. It was a God-given talent that was stirred by the Devil. He had to live with the faces of all those people he killed.
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