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The star of such acclaimed films as The English Patient, Schindler's List, and Quiz Show felt he had very good reason to be a touch nervous.
He was in St Petersburg, about to embark on one of the biggest gambles of his career. Fiennes was set to make a big screen version of Pushkin's tragic romantic poem, Eugene Onegin - a story which Fiennes says is about the fragility of love and a work that Russians said couldn't be translated to film, and, particularly, not by a quintessential Englishman.
Then there were other problems. Wheelers and dealers within the movie industry didn't feel that the project was commercial - the hero doesn't even get the girl. So despite Fiennes being twice Oscar-nominated, this was going to be a hard sell, especially in America.
Yet Fiennes was determined. So much so that he took on two roles, star and executive producer, the first time that he had been so directly involved in the production of a movie.
It's clear to see that the making of Onegin - as his movie is called - became a magnificent obsession. It was one that was shared by his talented family: sister Martha - who'd previously made pop promos and commercials - was recruited as director, while brother Magnus was brought in to compose the score.
So when Fiennes and his crew - his cast includes Liv Tyler as the girl whom Onegin spurns and then realises too late he loves - finally reached Russia he knew they needed every possible break.
"And we were very lucky," he says, relaxing sockless and open-shirted at the San Sebastian Film Festival. "The very first night out in St Petersburg, I went to bed in my hotel and there were a few flakes of snow starting to fall.
"We had brought fake snow with us but we wanted to have real snow, if we could. So I crossed my fingers and thought please, please let there be lots of snow tomorrow, and when I got up the next day it was the classic snow-covered city. To be there in the clothes of Onegin and walking past the beautiful Peter and Paul Fortress, and having all this snow in St Petersburg was quite a telling moment for everyone."
Fiennes, who is more chatty than at any previous encounter I have had with this normally monosyllabic and withdrawn actor, admits that raising the cash to make Onegin had not been easy. Making the film on a fairly tight budget also meant that the film crew's time in Russia was limited to a week. As he admits, it was not ideal.
"Originally, I had wanted to shoot everything in Russia. But when our producer broke it down financially, not only did we have problems with the seasons, shooting summer and winter in one film, we could not afford on our budget to stay in Russia all winter and then into summer," says Fiennes.
"We always felt we had to get some genuine Russian footage, some St Petersburg footage and some that sells the vastness of Russia, which is the opening of the film with the sleigh ride taking Onegin into the country. So we did all the location filming in one week.
"One hears all these rumours of how terrible it is to shoot in Russia and how you'll get stopped on the streets if you haven't paid money to the right person, etc, etc. But actually, it was quite smooth. We were able to use all the locations that we planned."
Fiennes agrees that America will be the toughest nut to crack. Indeed, for a time it seemed that Onegin was struggling to receive a distribution deal on that side of the Atlantic. But despite all those headaches, he insists that the tragic romance easily relates to today's audiences.
"The central story of love mis-timed and the fragility of the emotions I would argue are perennial," he tells me.
He also reveals that he had considered, and dismissed, the notion of taking Eugene Onegin and transferring it into a contemporary setting.
"But early on, Martha and I felt that if it really works it would work for a modern audience in its original setting. Also there is a power to the duel in the film and the themes of honour which we don't have today but are still compelling for today's audience. The questions involved in the heightened encounter of a duel still work for an audience. Even though we don't practise it overtly, I think we still buy into it and understand it as an audience."
Even though he has so many uncertainties, one thing remains crystal clear . . . that Ralph Fiennes is one of our very best screen stars. That has been underlined by his nomination as European actor of the year for a film that has yet to be seen in this country. In The Taste of Sunshine, Fiennes plays three men of successive generations in the same Jewish family in Austro-Hungary earlier this century. As with Onegin, it is a work of which he is extremely proud.
"It is a very ambitious, important film about being Jewish and the identity of the individual anywhere who has to compromise to conform with the tribe that is in power," says Fiennes.
"So it is more than just a Jewish story. It is about groups anywhere who are forced to twist themselves inside out to be something that they are not. It touches on the Holocaust in the middle part of the film. The setting is Hungary and the film looks at a family, the first two generations of which go through the stages of assimilation, from changing their name to converting to Catholicism.
"In the last part, the third character I play, who is completely confused, is devoted to the Stalinist/Communist regime. That is the ultimate assimilation I suppose, being absorbed into a regime that promises the new world and then is seen to be deeply corrupt and bigoted and terrible.
"In the end The Taste of Sunshine is about is the courage of the individual to stand alone and be themselves."
Fiennes completes a trio of literary adaptations with Neil Jordan's version of the controversial Graham Greene novel The End of the Affair, which we'll see in February and in which he stars with American actress Julianne Moore, who won acclaim in Short Cuts. The offer to star in this latest take on the Greene story - Van Johnson, Deborah Kerr, and Peter Cushing starred in a po-faced 1950s version - came at the worst possible time for Fiennes.
"I finished Onegin which was really very exhausting and went to do The Taste of Sunshine which is very long and then I promised myself that I wouldn't work for a long time. Then I received Neil Jordan's adaptation of The End of the Affair," he says with a grin.
Immediately Fiennes realised that the holiday would have to wait. This was a role he couldn't reject. It was one he was born to play. He knew that, but friends had known it first.
"By coincidence people had said to me that I should read this Graham Greene novel because it was something that I might want to do one day," he says.
And they were right.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on November 18, 1999
EL STEPHO