World-class Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev (“Leviathan”) returned to the Croisette this year in Cannes competition with “Minotaur,” having recovered from a near-fatal illness. After contracting a severe case of COVID in 2021, he reacted badly to the Sputnik vaccine and was put into a medically induced coma for 14 days. When he came out of it, his arms and legs were paralyzed due to Guillain-Barré Syndrome. He lay flat on his back for a year.
When he left the hospital in Germany in 2022, as he told me while at Cannes this year, he was in a wheelchair. While he says he hasn’t watched TV for 20 years now, “I watched a lot of films online,” he said through an interpreter on the roof of the Palais. “I read some things. I did not know if I would ever be able to walk again, to live again as a normal person. I have still now some consequences. I’m not at my best. I have regained completely the motion of my hands, but I have still a bit of a difficulty walking.”
But he did manage to shoot his sixth feature film last year, but not in Russia. After nine months of waiting, in the spring of 2023, he let go of one expensive project (“Jupiter”) for which he couldn’t seem to raise funding. “I said, ‘Let’s put it on ice, we’ll come back to it later. I don’t want to sit and wait for years and years for you to find the money. I want to make a film now.’”
So instead the filmmaker focused on a parallel project he had also been developing, an adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 thriller “The Unfaithful Wife,” starring Stéphane Audran as a well-heeled wife cheating on her husband, which was later remade as “Unfaithful” with Richard Gere and Diane Lane. The result, “Minotaur,” is the “Leviathan Oscar nominee’s first film in nearly a decade, since 2017’s “Loveless.”
At the same time that the filmmaker was coping with his illness, four years ago, at the start of the Ukraine war, he made the decision to leave Russia and move to Paris. Going back to Russia would mean the risk of being considered a traitor or an enemy of the state in Russia. “It might result in us becoming what is called foreign agents; it’s a hard thing,” he said. “Maybe this will happen, maybe not. Let’s not be too pessimistic, but mostly all independent journalists are saying that their oppressions are going to get even harsher, and that I think we have decades ahead of us before things get better.”
His 16-year-old had been studying at a French high school in Moscow before the war. “His French was pretty good,” said Zvyagintsev. “So it was an obvious choice. And also, my wife [has been] in love with France for a long time, she has been learning French for many years. So it was a choice, also for both of them, and for their future.”
How’s his French? “Zero. The other reason for me was that France is the homeland to cinema; that’s where cinema was born, and also there are so many cinephiles among spectators. Also here in France, directors have the final cut. In the states, it’s much harder to get in a position where you are not censored; it’s not a producer or someone who decides instead of you.”
The filmmaker set about creating believable Russian locations in Riga, Latvia, which still resembles its neighbor country. “The dormitory suburbs around Riga look exactly like Russian dormitory suburbs,” said Zvyagintsev. “A Russian eye would not be able to distinguish between Russia and Latvia in this instance. As for interiors, Anton’s flat was constructed as a set, so it’s a constructed set, and the villa where the main characters live is a contemporary building, a very modern one, and you could find something exactly like this anywhere.”
When it came to finding his cast, the casting director put out a call for Russian characters of a certain age. “Every actor from anywhere who is interested in working with you, they will send you a video presentation,” said Zvyagintsev. “They can be from Argentina, London, Moscow, Paris, wherever. You send them a scene they have to play, and they make a self-tape for you on their iPhone. Before, I despised self-tapes, but it’s convenient, because now with everybody scattered around the world, it’s the only way for us to work. We could not possibly pay for all the people I wanted to check to come to Riga to make a real-life casting. There were people also from Riga who do speak Russian.”
One serious issue for Russian actors still living in Russia was the possible repercussions of participating in a Zvyagintsev project. “I would talk to them about the script and show them parts of the script, so that they know what they’re getting involved in, because, of course, they were at risk of getting blacklisted,” he said. Most of them, with heartache, refused to take part in the film, but there was one who accepted, and I’m still completely amazed at his courage. It’s the main part, the main character, [actor] Dmitriy Mazurov. I said to him, ‘Are you sure you want to film with me?’ And he said, ‘If I’m not doing this part, I don’t know what I’m doing in acting.’”
Of course, the filmmaker took a different approach to the Chabrol story. “In the first minute, the story is completely revealed,” he said. “We understand that she is being unfaithful, so then all the film is about observing him, observing her, trying to understand, hesitating, and trying to guess what is going on, and while he observes, the spectator starts doing it along with him. And after the murder, actually, he goes back to this position where he’s mostly observing her reaction to the disappearance of a lover, yeah, and she knows what’s going on, and again it’s about observation.”
The filmmaker loved one bravura sequence that is 20 minutes long without any dialogue at all. “The sequence after the murder, it’s 20 minutes, even a little bit more, with not one subtitle, so you only observe his actions, and there are no words: it’s extremely cinematic in its essence.”
And Zvyagintsev added many telling details from the real world, from corruption to the war. “The Chabrol film is much more classical,” he said. “It follows a pattern: he killed, then he’s discovered, and then he will be punished. And I wanted to break up this classical structure and to invent something different based on our Russian realities.”
Was shooting the movie a physical challenge? “When you are full of inspiration, when you are searching constantly for solutions, the light, the sets, the performance of the actors, you don’t feel fatigued in the same way,” he said. “There is such a joy in making the film that is, in your head, real. I think it’s the best drug there is.”
Next up, he will try and resuscitate “Jupiter.” ” I have met some producers who are interested in it,” he said, “so hopefully we will be able to get it moving again.”
