[1] Gordon was a classmate of Andrey Tarkovskiy at the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), in the directing department taught by Mikhail Romm, graduating in 1960.

They had two children: Mikhail Aleksandrovich Tarkovskiy (born 1958), a writer, cinematographer, biologist, and fur trapper living off the land in the eastern Siberian taiga,[3] and Ekaterina (Katya) Aleksandrovna Tarkovskaya, an actress since childhood.

In the late 1970s through the 80s, he made films in the genre of a tough crime-adventure, rare for the pre-perestroika Soviet Union: Skirmish in a Blizzard, Double Passing, Ransom, which allowed a violent confrontation between a criminal and a citizen of the "era of developed socialism".

Until his death, he was the director of the Mosfilm studios, where in the mid-1980s he provided Russian dubbing voices for Andrei Tarkovskiy's films shot abroad: Nostalghia and The Sacrifice.

[5] After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he continued as director of the new Mosfilm, stopped directing films himself and instead turned to writing,[6] authoring three books, beginning in 2006 with a memoir of Tarkovskiy "Unquenched Thirst".