By some quirk of fate, many people think that "Short Stories" was my first feature-length film, despite the festival success of "Franz+Polina".

• I THINK THIS IS BECAUSE "SHORT STORIES" IS THE FIRST FILM I MADE FROM MY OWN SCREENPLAY AND YOU CAN FEEL NOT JUST MY DIRECTING STYLE, BUT ALSO MY WRITING.

The humour, the characters and the poetry of the situation – these are the things viewers picked up on. It all started from me being upset at the long pause after the release of "Franz", which came out in 2006 and now it was already 2011. I decided to do two things I'd never done before – quickly make a short film and get into Kinotavr (the most famous Russian film festival). Short films are usually what students make. I'd never made one, I started straight from a feature-length film. But in the current situation (I only had a month until the deadline) I only had enough time to make something short for submission to the competition. I finalized one of my ideas and with the help of my producer friends Anastasia Kavunovskaya and Andrey Kretov I shot "Fix-It-All". And my friend of many years Andrey Merzlikin played the main role. I got lucky – it was selected for Kinotavr and then it even went on to win. Then Andrey Kretov suggested I make "Fix-It-All" into a feature-length film. It was summer and there was only time to use some material that I had already written. I took three of my storylines that I had ready and that's how we improvised and shot "Short Stories", pretty much without any preparation. A year later the film was shown at Kinotavr 2012, where it won Best Screenplay. I am very grateful to this film for it coming about and how as a consequence.

• I WAS NO LONGER JUST A DIRECTOR, BUT A CREATOR OF FILMS.

Though I put a lot of myself into "Franz+Polina", the plot was based on the short story by Ales Adamovich. In the music videos I made before, I tried my hardest to create my own world, though the songs, the most important aspect of the music videos, were not my own. In this film I was responsible for every word, every syllable and every sound. This is why in some respects "Short Stories" was my first film.