Klimov decided to continue this playful approach of rewarding each other but after all the years of their union Klimov alone received the ten rouble reward and only twice: for Heat and for The Ascent. Beginning of production The next step was the need for the script's approval from the State Committee for Cinematography. By that time Shepitko had already gained a reputation of an inconvenient director. In 1973, when she raised the topic of making the film, the answer from an official of the State Committee for Cinematography was a firm negative. The director did not spark a confrontation but she also did not offer any other projects. Throughout her directing career, Shepitko only started working on a film if she felt that "if she does not do it, then she dies." For help in overcoming the resistance of the authorities and the State Political Directorate, Shepitko turned to Gemma Firsova with whom she had studied at VGIK. Firsova was an administrator of an association of military-patriotic films. She was affected much more by the script than by the novel and the day she met Shepitko, she went to the meet the Minister of Cinematography Philippe Ermash. In a conversation with Ermash's replacement (in her memoirs Firsova did not call Boris Pavlenok by his name), Firsova said that she took the script under her responsibility, with a lie that "everything will be fine with the State Political Directorate." Ermash's replacement reacted skeptically to the pleas, and the subsequent process from script approval to acceptance of the film's actors was accompanied by considerable difficulties. The main accusation was that Shepitko allegedly made a religious parable with a mystical tone from the partisan story; this was considered an insurrection in the atheistic Soviet cinema. Shepitko retorted that she was not religious and that a story about betrayal was antediluvian. According to her, Judas and Jesus had always existed and that if the legend connected with people then this means that it was alive in every person. Officials met Schnittke's score with resistance and they ordered that the allusions to biblical texts be removed. From the moment she read the story Sotnikov, it took Larisa Shepitko four years to prepare and to obtain permits from the authorities to begin shooting the picture. Casting Shepitko decided to use unknown or little-known actors whose past roles would not cast a shadow on their characters