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The film is based very loosely on the novel Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. In the book, a central theme is that the Zone is full of strange artifacts and phenomena that apparently defy physics. A vestige of this idea in the film is the ritual, performed by the Stalker, of throwing metal nuts into one's path before walking anywhere. The purpose of this is to detect gravitational anomalies that would crush one.
In the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident, the scientists investigating the mysterious and dangerous ruins of the reactor sardonically referred to themselves as "Stalkers" and to the reactor as the "Zone".
Tarkovsky had been assigned a large budget for Stalker, in order to match the success of his previous science fiction movie, Solaris. The idea was that the Soviet Union should show that what Hollywood could do, the Russians could also do. The Strugatsky brothers had written an extensive script with several special effects based on their novel Roadside Picnic.
Tarkovsky responded by immediately removing all the sideline stories, and all special effects from the script. He thus restructured the whole story to be about one single philosophical subject from the original story: if you could have your innermost wish fulfilled, would you actually want to? The story was also rewritten into a very intense drama involving only three people.
The central part of the film was shot in a few days at a closed and deserted hydro power plantHydropower (or waterpower harnesses the energy of moving or falling water. This is usually in the form of hydroelectricity from a dam, but it can be used directly as a mechanical force. The term refers to a number of systems in which flowing water drives at the river Piliteh in TallinnThe city of Tallinn (also known by its German name Reval is the capital city and main seaport of Estonia. It is located on Estonia's north coast to the Baltic Sea, 80 kilometres south of Helsinki. Name "Tallinn" Other historical names are Koluvan, Lindani. When the team got back to MoscowMoscow ( Russian: Moskva capital of Russia, located on the river Moskva, and encompassing 878. The city's population is rapidly increasing, with 11. 2 million inhabitants counted in 2004. The city is in the federal district called Central Russia (which is, they found that all the film had been improperly developed, probably because of problems at the laboratory. The photographer, Georgi Rerberg left the first screening session and never came back. Thus they had to go back and film the whole thing once again, now with Aleksandr Knyazhinsky as principal photographer. The weather was considerably colder by then, and the pain and frustration displayed by the actors is sometimes not a case of acting. According to sound engineer Vladimir Ivanovich Sharun these conditions might have even contributed to the early deaths of many of the people involved in the production.