First Film of Andrey Tarkovsky

1956 "The Killers" is the first film of the great director. The film was made when Tarkovsky was in his  third year at VGIK, in the Fall semester, together with his classmates A. Gordon and M. Bakey. At that time, collected  works of Ernest Hemingway were  published for the first time in the Soviet Union, and Tarkovsky proposed to make a short film based on Hemingway story. VGIK officially approved the project, which enabled the students to make a film based on a works of a foreign author.

The first and last scene in the cafe were filmed ( ) by Tarkovsky, the second scene, in the room Andresen, was filmed by A.Gordon. All the roles in the film are played by students of VGIK. The film was highly appreciated by the master of this VGIK course,  Mikhail Romm. Movie script was written by Tarkovsky and Gordon. The film was directed by Bakey, Gordon, and Tarkovsky.

See Alexander Gordon publication for more: The parts were to be played by fellow students — Nick Adams by Yuli Fait, Ole Anderson the former boxer, of course, by Vasily Shukshin. The murderers were Valentin Vinogradov, a directing student, and Boris Novikov, an acting student. I played the cafe owner... 

By 2002, it was other way around: Steven Soderbergh "Solaris",  a reflection on  Tarkovsky's "Solaris" (1972); both based on a sci-fi story by a Polish writer Stanislav Lem.