page_title: Mio in the Land of Faraway
section_title: Production
hierarchical_section_title: Mio in the Land of Faraway / Production
caption_attribution_description: English: Gamla Stan from Katarinahissen
context_page_description: Mio in the Land of Faraway is a 1987 fantasy film directed by Vladimir Grammatikov and starring Christopher Lee, Christian Bale, Nicholas Pickard, Timothy Bottoms and Susannah York. Based on the 1954 novel Mio, My Son by Astrid Lindgren, it tells the story of a boy from Stockholm who travels to an otherworldly fantasy realm and frees the land from an evil knight's oppression.
  Mio in the Land of Faraway was co-produced by companies from Sweden, Norway and the Soviet Union with a budget of about fifty million Swedish kronor, making it the most expensive film adaptation of an Astrid Lindgren book during her lifetime. It featured an international cast consisting largely of British, Russian and Scandinavian actors, while its filming locations included Stockholm, Moscow, Crimea, and Scotland. The film was shot in English and subsequently dubbed in Swedish and Russian. Its special effects were created by Derek Meddings. The film's theme song, "Mio My Mio", was composed by two former ABBA members, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, and performed by the Swedish band Gemini.
context_section_description: Various companies from Sweden, Norway and the Soviet Union were involved in making Mio in the Land of Faraway. It was co-produced by Nordisk Tonefilm International AB and Gorky Film Studio with assistance from the Swedish Film Institute, Norway Film Development, and Sovinfilm. Its budget was about fifty million Swedish kronor, making it the most expensive film adaptation of an Astrid Lindgren book during her lifetime.
  Filming took place between March 1986 and July 1986. Helmed by Russian director Vladimir Grammatikov, the project featured an international cast consisting largely of British, Scandinavian and Russian actors. Filming locations included Stockholm, Moscow, the Crimea,  and Eilean Donan Castle in Scotland. The film was shot in English, and subsequently dubbed in Swedish and Russian.
  For his role as Kato, Christopher Lee had to wear a steel hand during filming sessions. In 1997, he recalled various difficulties while shooting the film in Moscow during 1986:
  As a work environment it was a horror story. [...] For us the faraway land was the Soviet Union, where the food was uneatable, the sanitation unspeakable, the political people ubiquitous. [...] It was irritating work: Nothing ever happened before lunch, and since it took forever to light a scene, not much after it. These were the standard frustrations of Russian filmmaking at that time.
  The Chernobyl disaster occurred at the same time that the cast and crew were filming scenes in Ukraine, forcing them to evacuate the area and postpone shooting for a month. In a 2008 Details interview, Christian Bale briefly recalled their evacuation and subsequent return: "We knew something had occurred, because production came to us and they said, 'We're done. We have to leave.' A month later we were back. We would have somebody with a Geiger counter at every dinner, scanning each plate".
  The film's special effects were created by Derek Meddings. The film's theme song, "Mio My Mio", was composed by two former ABBA members, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, and performed by the Swedish band Gemini. The film's background music was composed by Anders Eljas with assistance from Benny Andersson, and performed by the Soviet Film Symphony Orchestra with Sergei Skripka as the conductor.
  This film was Nicholas Pickard's debut as an actor. It was also the feature-film debut of Christian Bale, who reappeared in December that year as the NBR-acclaimed lead of Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (1987).
caption: Stockholm.
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