Wissenswertes

Many visitors of the Rossiya Hotel bar stayed on set after the bar was closed, to see the filming of the scene with Rubik and Mimino dancing lezginka. Right during filming, Frunzik Mkrtchyan drank with his Armenian friends and they talked him into doing a split and picking up his handkerchief, to make him look better than "the Georgian," but Mkrtchyan wasted several takes trying to do it because, being too drunk, he couldn't hold himself properly. In the end, Georgiy Daneliya secretly told Vakhtang Kikabidze to grab the handkerchief while Mkrtchyan was doing the split and this was how the scene was shot.

The concept of the film arose when Revaz Gabriadze told Georgiy Daneliya a story about a pilot who lived in Kutaisi (Georgia) and locked his plane to the ground with a chain. However, it was to be screened only years later. The original script of this movie was entitled "Nichevo osobennovo..." ("Nothing Special...") and had an entirely different plot but a friend of Daneliya's, a writer named Maksud Ibragimbekov, remembered the story about the pilot and the chain in a conversation with Daneliya and the latter decided to replace the story literally days before filming. Vakhtang Kikabidze recalled later that most of the film was shot without a script and that during filming, he had an impression that they were fooling around rather than working. The line "Nichevo osobennovo" remained in the film (it was said by Mimino on a plane).

In a deleted scene, two Japanese tourists met Rubik and Mimino in a Rossiya Hotel elevator and one of the tourists said to the other, "Those Russians all look the same."

Rubik Khachikyan's character was originally supposed to be from Leninakan (present-day Gyumri), the native city of Frunzik Mkrtchyan. However, composer Giya Kancheli wanted another Armenian city, Dilijan, to be mentioned in the film because he wrote his symphonies there. Georgiy Daneliya objected, saying Dilijan was a resort while Leninakan was a city of workers. In order to persuade Daneliya to relocate Rubik's residence to Dilijan, Kancheli even bribed Daneliya with his new jacket.

Georgiy Daneliya asked Giya Kancheli to write a song like "Yesterday" by The Beatles for the film and Kancheli agreed but wrote the song "Chito-gvrito" that was nothing like "Yesterday". Nevertheless, Daneliya accepted it. "Prikhodit den, ukhodit den" (in Russian) and "Chito-gvrito" (in Georgian), the two songs used in the opening credits, were performed by star Vakhtang Kikabidze himself. The songs from the film became hits once the film was released.