Andrei Tarkovsky Trivia
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59 free Andrei Tarkovsky trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Andrei Tarkovsky trivia quiz covers the Soviet master who made only seven features and changed cinema with every one of them. The easy questions are the ones any film lover can manage: the Zone and the Room, the ocean planet, the icon painter, the country he was born in and the book he called Sculpting in Time. From there the set moves through the films in order: the Golden Lion for Ivan's Childhood, the censored Andrei Rublev and its bell-casting finale, Solaris and its levitation scene, the autobiographical Mirror and its third-category release, Stalker's ruined negatives and toxic Estonian locations, Nostalghia's candle in the drained pool and The Sacrifice's house that burned twice. The harder end is for the devotees: his teacher Mikhail Romm, the Hemingway short he made as a student, the geological expedition in the taiga that made him choose film, cinematographers Vadim Yusov and Sven Nykvist, the actors he used again and again, the Strugatsky novel behind Stalker, the Hamlet he staged at the Lenkom, the Boris Godunov at Covent Garden, his defection in Italy, the diaries called Martyrology, the gravestone inscription and the minor planet named after him. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for Tarkovsky and each of his films before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Classic Cinema, Film Directors and Science Fiction Movies quizzes next.
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Q 01Which river runs past Tarkovsky's birthplace, Zavrazhye?
The Volga
The Volga: his mother had gone to stay with relatives there, and Tarkovsky was born in the house of her stepfather, a doctor at the village hospital.
Q 02How many feature films did Tarkovsky direct in his career?
7
Only 7 features in a quarter-century: five in the Soviet Union, where film officials stalled project after project, and two in exile before cancer killed him at 54.
Q 03What was Tarkovsky's first feature film, released in 1962?
Ivan's Childhood
Ivan's Childhood reached him as a wreck: another director's footage had been scrapped as unusable, and the unknown graduate was handed the war story to rescue.
Q 04Which festival prize did Tarkovsky's debut feature win in 1962?
The Golden Lion
The Golden Lion at Venice made his name at 30, yet Communist critics attacked the film as bourgeois, and it was Jean-Paul Sartre who defended it in print.
Q 05Under which filmmaker did Tarkovsky study at the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK)?
Mikhail Romm
Mikhail Romm taught Tarkovsky side by side with his opposite, the future writer-director Vasily Shukshin, who played the hunted ex-boxer in Tarkovsky's first student film.
Q 06Tarkovsky's first student short, The Killers (1956), was adapted from a story by which writer?
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway's story became a 19-minute student thriller shot in a mocked-up American bar, with Tarkovsky himself playing a customer who whistles through the tense silence.
Q 07What was Tarkovsky's diploma film, sold to Mosfilm and co-written with Andrei Konchalovsky?
The Steamroller and the Violin
The Steamroller and the Violin ran 46 minutes, and the unknown student had the nerve to ask the star cameraman of The Cranes Are Flying to shoot it; he was turned down.
Q 08Before film school, Tarkovsky worked as a prospector on a year-long expedition in which region?
The Siberian taiga near Turukhansk
The Siberian taiga near Turukhansk held him for nearly a year: he tramped the Kureika river country collecting samples, filled an album with sketches, and came home set on film school.
Q 09Which director remade Solaris in 2002 with George Clooney in the lead role?
Steven Soderbergh
Steven Soderbergh insisted he was filming the original novel afresh, not remaking Tarkovsky; his producer was James Cameron, the director of Titanic.
Q 10Tarkovsky's father Arseny was celebrated in which art form?
Poetry
Poetry came late for Arseny Tarkovsky: known for decades as a translator, he was in his mid-fifties before his first collection appeared in 1962, the year of his son's first feature.
Q 11Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky's 1966 epic, portrays the life of what kind of artist?
An icon painter
An icon painter the film never shows at work: his paintings appear only in the closing minutes, when the black-and-white picture suddenly turns to colour.
Q 12What was the original 205-minute cut of Tarkovsky's 1966 medieval epic called?
The Passion According to Andrei
The Passion According to Andrei had one Moscow screening before it was shelved; Tarkovsky later insisted that nobody but he had cut it, and called the shorter version the best.
Q 13The final episode of Andrei Rublev follows the boy Boriska as he undertakes what task?
Q 21Which visual motif appears in several Tarkovsky films, most notably Solaris?
Characters levitating
Characters levitating: asked why bodies so often rise into the air in his films, he said simply that the scene has great power and makes the image more filmic, more photogenic.
Q 22Which Tarkovsky film is the most autobiographical, built from his own family memories and dreams?
Mirror
Mirror contains, he said, no invented episodes, only his family's history; once it was finished, the dreams of his childhood home that had haunted him for years stopped.
Q 23Tarkovsky's 1975 autobiographical film opens with a television clip of a boy being cured of what?
A stutter
Casting a giant bell
Casting a giant bell is a bluff with his life at stake: Boriska swears his dead father left him the secret, and only when it rings does he sob that he was told nothing.
Q 14Andrei Rublev opens with a prologue in which a man named Yefim takes flight by what means?
A hot air balloon
A hot air balloon lifts Yefim from a church tower past an angry crowd, and for a few ecstatic moments he sees the land from the sky; then he crashes to earth.
Q 15In Andrei Rublev, what vow does the hero take in penance after the sack of Vladimir?
A vow of silence
A vow of silence: Rublev has just killed a soldier with an axe to save a holy fool from rape, and for years afterwards he neither speaks nor practises his art.
Q 16Solaris (1972) was adapted from a novel by which writer?
Stanisław Lem
Stanisław Lem quarrelled with Tarkovsky over the script and later complained that the director had not filmed Solaris at all, but Crime and Punishment.
Q 17Which science fiction film did Tarkovsky call 'phoney' and 'a lifeless schema' before he made Solaris?
2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey struck him as cold, sterile and obsessed with gadgets; Soviet publicity then sold Solaris as the Russian answer to it.
Q 18Who plays psychologist Kris Kelvin in Solaris?
Donatas Banionis
Donatas Banionis, a Lithuanian stage star, had played a suave Soviet agent in the 1968 thriller Dead Season, the film Vladimir Putin says inspired him to join the KGB.
Q 19Who plays Hari, the dead wife who reappears aboard the station in Solaris?
Natalya Bondarchuk
Natalya Bondarchuk was his third choice: Tarkovsky first meant to cast his ex-wife, then settled on Sweden's Bibi Andersson, before returning to the young Russian who had first shown him the novel.
Q 20Which prize did Solaris win at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival?
The Grand Prix Spécial du Jury
The Grand Prix Spécial du Jury crowned a tactical choice: with a personal script rejected, he had proposed science fiction, betting it would look safe to Soviet film officials.
A stutter: a therapist hypnotises the boy until his speech flows freely. The film itself was nearly muffled: Soviet officials gave it only a small, restricted release.
Q 24Which real family member appears on screen in Tarkovsky's 1975 autobiographical film?
His mother Maria Vishnyakova
His mother Maria Vishnyakova plays the mother in old age, sharing the role with the actress Margarita Terekhova; his father is heard on the soundtrack but never seen.
Q 25Stalker (1979) was loosely based on which novel by the Strugatsky brothers?
Roadside Picnic
Roadside Picnic recounts several trips into the Zone; the film cut them to a single journey and kept little else from the novel beyond the Zone itself and the guide who leads people in.
Q 26In Stalker, what lies at the heart of the Zone?
A room that grants innermost desires
A room that grants innermost desires waits at the end of the journey, yet when the three men finally reach its threshold, not one of them dares to step inside.
Q 27What is the name of the Stalker's mentor, who grew rich in the Zone and then hanged himself?
Porcupine
Porcupine, the Stalker says, sent his own brother to his death in the Zone, came home fabulously rich, and then hanged himself.
Q 28Why did almost all of Stalker have to be shot again?
Badly developed negatives ruined the footage
Badly developed negatives ruined the footage from months of location work in 1977; Tarkovsky suspected sabotage, lost his cameraman, and won funding to begin again as a two-part film.
Q 29Near which city were the Zone scenes of Stalker filmed?
Tallinn
Tallinn was a last resort: an earthquake ruled out the first-choice locations in Tajikistan, and months of searching ended at derelict power stations outside the Estonian capital.
Q 30What did Stalker's sound designer blame for Tarkovsky's fatal cancer?
Chemicals from a plant upstream of the location
Chemicals from a plant upstream of the location: Vladimir Sharun recalled white foam on the river and rashes on the crew, and noted that Tarkovsky's wife and an actor died of the same cancer.