Director Mochalov told about the shooting of the series “Novorossia”. Potemkin

— Yaroslav, before Potemkin, you worked mainly on detectives and projects of the criminal genre, such as “The Healer”, “The Trap on the Judge” and so on. The historical series is new territory for you. It may not be easy to switch to such material

- It was very interesting. And of course it's scary. But so what? This is the story of Potemkin, who repeatedly said that everything impossible can be done – you just have to try. I tried, and I did.

- There are a lot of historical series being shot now and it is not so easy to stand out in this heat. Have you ever wanted to make a series unlike any other historical series?

- No one really talked about Potemkin in the cinema. We're first. If we talked about him before, then briefly and always with an emphasis on the fact that he was Catherine’s favorite. Although his deeds are more than weighty for the country, they were almost not reflected in the cinema. We have sought historicism more than is usually done. They didn’t play with history for the sake of adventure. We told the story of Potemkin and his deeds. These are not free fantasies on the topic, but a true biography of a statesman who changed the map of Russia.

- What personally impressed you in the biography of Potemkin?

Potemkin is a man who has achieved everything himself. Yes, he was Catherine’s favorite, but he became great not through favoritism, but because of his character, intelligence and talent. Catherine probably gave him a chance, but all he achieved was his own merit.

- Projects about the times of the past always mean difficult production. It takes quite a lot of things, including interesting places to shoot. And you have such a geography in the series

- These are the tears of our producers. Potemkin has visited so many places in his life that in our series each of them appears on the screen only once. There were many locations, and they were all different. They were filmed in the Marble and Catherine Palaces, in the Kelkh mansion, in the Ivangorod fortress – it turned into Ochakov and the Crimea, as well as in Vyborg and Kamennogorsk. It's about three hundred objects. And these places really added the same Potemkin atmosphere – large-scale, powerful, but at the same time alive.

- You have already noted that you decided to show in the series not so much the favorite of Catherine, as a major statesman. But the melodramatic line is still of great importance in this case. How did you recreate the relationship between the Empress and her favorite?

- We hope that we managed to show love, respect, trust, and that they fully understood each other and believed in each other. About the relationship of Catherine and Potemkin we judge the letters, diaries of contemporaries and our own ideas about them. Are our feelings true? Maybe it wasn't quite like that. But we tried to show their feelings precisely from the documents: from their letters to each other, from Catherine’s confessions, from the notes they exchanged for the rest of their lives.