On October 3rd, 1833, a low-ranking St. Petersburg civil servant named Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin sat down and began keeping a diary. It was, as it happened, the same day that The Northern Bee — the city's most widely read newspaper — published a report on the fight for the Spanish throne. Poprishchin read it. The coincidence lodged somewhere in his already-loosening mind. Weeks later, he would become convinced that he himself was the rightful King of Spain.
This is, of course, fiction — Nikolai Gogol's 1835 masterpiece Diary of a Madman, a tragicomic portrait of a man whose grip on reality dissolves entry by entry into grandiosity and grief. But the discovery that Gogol had calibrated his story's opening date to a real newspaper headline — that the seed of Poprishchin's delusion was planted by an actual edition of this very publication — is the kind of detail that makes a researcher's hands tremble.
Michael Mennies knows the feeling well. He and his assistant found that detail in the St. Petersburg Library Archives, in the summer of 1997. He had started working on his first film the year before, and by the time he moved to Russia in December of 1999 the screenplay was finished. Then it sat on a shelf for twenty-five years.
Mennies raises the question himself, with a wry smile rather than any real anguish. His own naivety, he admits, was thinking that if he just got a great script written, everything else would fall into place — he'd find the millions needed to film it, and make his film debut as a director. Unlike Poprishchin, he could see reality clearly enough — he just couldn't do much about it.
The story of how this film came to be begins not with Mennies but with his collaborator, actor Rush Pearson. In the fall of 1977, Pearson was a student at Northwestern University, sitting in a class taught by Frank Galati — the legendary director who would later win two Tony Awards for his staging of The Grapes of Wrath and collect nine Joseph Jefferson Awards for his contributions to Chicago theater. Galati introduced the class to Gogol's story. It lodged in Pearson's mind and stayed there.
Thirteen years later, in 1990, Pearson found himself looking for a text to memorize — he had spent five years performing improvisational comedy at Renaissance Faires and felt the muscle atrophying. Diary of a Madman was the first thing he thought of. He tracked down a literal translation, worked with a friend to shape it into performable English, and put it on stage at Chicago's Prop Theatre in February 1991 as a late-night show. It ran for four months. He took it to the Montreal Fringe Festival, to the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, to Los Angeles.
"Almost every line could be delivered for comedy or pathos. I found I could take a laughing audience to sadness, and on a different night take the same line to a sympathetic audience and get laughs."
It is, as it happens, exactly what Vissarion Belinsky — Russia's greatest literary critic — identified in the story nearly two centuries ago: laughter at a madman whose delirium both amuses and arouses compassion. Rush Pearson had found that quality instinctively, and held it in his hands for years before anyone thought to put it on film.
That quality — the story's refusal to be only one thing — is precisely what drew Michael Mennies to it when he encountered Pearson's performance. "Rush is an incredibly committed performer with intense focus," Mennies says. "It's hard to take your eyes off him when he's on stage. His comedy instincts are extraordinary. But when things got sad, you felt the pain of this character completely."
In 1996, Mennies was working as a sound editor at the Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley, California — part of one of the first digital sound editing teams in film post-production. DV video was arriving, and a new generation of low-budget filmmaking was opening up. After working on one rather bad film he would prefer not to name, Mennies caught the itch to direct. He figured the bar must not be as high as he thought. Thinking about what might make a good story, he kept coming back to Pearson's performance. "I knew if Rush loved this story that much, it had to be something really special." He asked Pearson if he wanted to adapt it for film together. Pearson said yes.
Five weeks after deciding to make the film, Mennies found himself in St. Petersburg, Russia — the very city where Gogol's story takes place. How he got there was its own chain of coincidences. He had left Berkeley to work as sound supervisor on a documentary, The Ad and the Ego, in his hometown of Philadelphia. Back in Berkeley, he was asked to take the film to a conference to help find a distributor. There, Roz Levaco — wife of director Ron Levaco, whose film Round Eyes in the Middle Kingdom Mennies had also worked on as sound supervisor — told him that Round Eyes had been accepted into St. Petersburg's Message to Man Film Festival, and asked if he'd like to come along. Five weeks after choosing his story, he was walking the streets Gogol had described. It was surreal.
At the festival, after a screening of director Aleksei Balabanov's short film Trofim — made for a showcase celebrating the 100th anniversary of cinema — Mennies introduced himself afterward. He told Balabanov the film reminded him of a Native American proverb: you are alive as long as people still talk about you. Balabanov immediately invited him to his apartment the following night for what Russians call a "Russian table."
It was Mennies' last night in the city. A large rock festival was underway that weekend, and Balabanov was deeply connected to the Russian rock world. Musicians kept arriving — among them Yegor Belkin and Nastia Poleva, subjects of Balabanov's earlier documentary, who remain Mennies' friends to this day. Mennies, who had started his professional career as a rock musician, found the evening particularly surreal — vodka flowed, and they sang Chuck Berry songs around the table, the same songs he'd been playing for years.
At some point in the evening, Balabanov asked Mennies to walk with him to the store for more supplies. It was 11pm, White Nights — still light outside. On the way, Balabanov offered to help with the film. Mennies, bewildered, asked why. You don't know me. I've never made a film. You're an accomplished director.
Balabanov's answer: "You Americans need to figure out everything. If you just believed in God, maybe you'd understand why things like this happen." Mennies jokes that at that moment, he felt like a believer.
Balabanov went on to become arguably the most important Russian director of his generation, and a pivotal figure in Mennies' career. Mennies went on to work on several of his films in various capacities, and it was Balabanov who introduced him to Melnitsa Animation — where Mennies' career in animation began.
Mennies went home and kept working on the script with Pearson.
Mennies went home and kept writing. He and Pearson worked through the screenplay together line by line over the following year — two strong-willed collaborators who didn't always agree, but who considered and settled every moment.
In the summer of 1997, Mennies returned to St. Petersburg and lived there for nearly five months. It was during this time that the research began in earnest. He and his assistant found actual copies of The Northern Bee in the St. Petersburg Library Archives — the newspaper Poprishchin reads in the story — and confirmed that the October 3rd edition had carried news of the Spanish succession crisis. Gogol had not invented the detail. He had embedded it, like a time capsule, calibrated to reality, waiting nearly two centuries to be found.
Then he found something else: a Northern Bee article about the city's new asylum, reporting that ninety percent of its patients were civil servants. The 1830s, Mennies learned, marked the first moment in Russian history when the mentally ill were treated as patients rather than as holy innocents through whom God might speak. Poprishchin's breakdown happens precisely at this hinge point.
"It's part of the tragedy of the story," Mennies says. "That he happened to be alive exactly at that moment."
The archival trail kept widening. Mennies uncovered the original script and score for Filatka and Miroshka, the vaudeville Poprishchin attends in the story. What looked like a passing comic detail turned out to be another mirror: the vaudeville's plot echoed Poprishchin's own unrequited love for Sophie. That same summer, Mennies storyboarded the entire film with Russian artist Vasily Gasilov — nearly a thousand frames in all. Costume designs were created by Nadezhda Vasileva. Production design, floor plans, maps — a complete world built on paper.
Back home, he and Pearson continued polishing the script. Rush joined Mennies on one of his subsequent St. Petersburg trips, soaking in the city firsthand. After being granted permission by Valery Gergiev — the famed Artistic and General Director of the Mariinsky Theatre — Mennies recorded the music from Filatka and Miroshka with a small St. Petersburg orchestra on October 3rd, 1997. Midway through the session, the lights began to flicker. When Mennies pointed out the date to the players, the string players tapped their bows on their music stands.
It was also that summer — at the Message to Man Film Festival again — that Mennies met his wife. He moved back to St. Petersburg at the end of 1999, and lived there until the summer of 2008. "I always joked," he says, "that I didn't get to make the film, but I did get to meet my wife and have a daughter. So, all in all, that was a better ending."
The budget came to between six and eight million dollars. It was only then that Mennies confronted the reality of raising that sum as a first-time director on what he calls, without apology, "a dark art film." He shelved the project.
This is the point in the story where Poprishchin reaches for the Spanish throne. Mennies, instead, built a career. His years in Russia had already drawn him into the animation world — helping bring Russian animation to the international market as a sales agent, and eventually becoming a co-creator and producer of The Fixies, an animated series still in production today. When he returned to the United States in 2008, he moved into voice direction and story editing, spending the next fifteen-plus years working with many of the finest stage actors in Philadelphia.
Then came generative AI and accessible motion capture.
"I originally imagined this as a live-action film with very difficult visual effects," Mennies says. "Now I want to make it as a surreal animated film, using motion capture to preserve the full power of live performance. I actually believe it will work better this way. And it simply wasn't possible before."
Returning to the screenplay now, after twenty-five years away, Mennies says he is struck by how considered it is — how every detail was argued over, landed on, and held. It took a year of taking a deep dive into generative AI, watching the platforms advance, and a growing desire to take on meaningful work to finally bring the project back out of its slumber.
Mennies is candid about what's different this time. He is not the same person who shelved the project twenty-five years ago. The years in Russia, the animation career, the voice direction work — all of it has made him significantly more equipped to take on a film of this complexity. He is, simply, thrilled to be giving it another shot.
On October 3rd, 1833, Poprishchin picked up his pen. Nearly two centuries later, someone is still trying to tell his story. Whether that is positive thinking or denial may depend entirely on what happens next.