An Exiled Filmmaker’s Unsparing View of Contemporary Russia
Gleb is a successful businessman, a Russian muzhik made good—wealthy, sturdy, practical—who owns a logistics company in a midsize, provincial city. His employees respect his competence and his no-nonsense direction; in turn, he looks after them, a stern but caring paternal figure. At home, things are different. His wife, Galina, a noble beauty, excels at the role of the plumed bird in a cage and yet suffers for it, fumbling around awkwardly for an escape. They are emotionally estranged but inexorably codependent, circling and watching each other in their tasteful lakefront home.
Two dilemmas that threaten to upend Gleb’s life emerge early in “Minotaur,” the new film by Andrey Zvyagintsev, the most celebrated Russian director of his generation, whose previous two movies were nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. “Minotaur” is set in the fictional city of Krasnoborsk in the fall of 2022, half a year into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when Vladimir Putin announced a so-called partial mobilization, or military draft. At the headquarters of Gleb’s company, workers huddle around a phone, watching a chaotic scene at the Russia-Georgia border. Thousands of Russian men fleeing the country to avoid being called up to fight are trying to cross, causing an enormous traffic jam. “Holy fuck,” one of Gleb’s employees says. Seven of them have already left; others are planning to.
This is one of the few glimpses that the film offers of the Special Military Operation, as Russia’s war in Ukraine is known in official parlance. The others are subtle, likely to be missed by an untrained eye: a parked car has a “Z” decal—an early symbol of the invasion adopted as a show of support—on its rear window; at a crosswalk, the camera lingers on a woman pushing a wounded veteran in a wheelchair. “The war unfolds on the periphery,” Zvyagintsev told me recently. “That was exactly the state of mind, the atmosphere, that defined the start of the conflict. Everything was hushed up—everything was taboo.”
At first, Gleb is consumed by a more domestic matter. He suspects that Galina is cheating on him. There are furtive text exchanges and suspicious trips to town. The couple gets into bed with an icy distance between them. A boozy dinner out with friends turns awkward and then, back home, ugly. “I’m tired of being your shadow,” Galina says. The plotline is borrowed from “La Femme Infidèle” (“The Unfaithful Wife”), a 1969 French psychological thriller, directed by Claude Chabrol. Like the husband in that film, Gleb sets out to uncover what he already knows.
The war in Ukraine, meanwhile, is closing in on him, too. The mayor of Krasnoborsk is demanding that Gleb and a handful of other local business leaders draw upon their employees to provide a quota of men for the invasion. The higher-ups in Moscow have made their needs clear, and the mayor dutifully transmits them. “We aren’t here to bargain,” he says. It’s impossible to know what Gleb thinks about the war. What matters is the narrow personal implications. “Can’t they achieve this without us?” he asks the mayor. They can’t—draft lists must be submitted by next Thursday or the state will start sweeping up men on its own. “He stays silent,” Zvyagintsev said, of Gleb. “Just sitting there with a total poker face.”
Zvyagintsev is not an overtly political filmmaker, but his movies are unsparing in their portrayal of life in contemporary Russia. “He’s a meticulous director, for whom mise en scène is absolutely central,” Joël Chapron, a French film historian who first met Zvyagintsev in the early two-thousands, told me. Varvara Shmykova, an actress who has had supporting roles in two of Zvyagintsev’s films, including “Minotaur,” said that Zvyagintsev doesn’t believe in the “magic of cinema,” in which miracles happen spontaneously during filming. Rather, she said, he “composes and shoots each frame with textbook precision.” The paradox, Shmykova continued, is that all this control produces something that feels uncannily genuine: “He manages to transfer the feeling of life itself onto the screen.”
Iris Lebedeva, who plays Galina, called Zvyagintsev’s process an “enormous puzzle, a moving mosaic.” She told me about shooting an early scene in which Gleb drives her character to a café. He suspects that her plan to get a coffee before a haircut is cover for a rendezvous with a lover. Zvyagintsev had “imagined how it all should be beforehand,” Lebedeva said. “That this tree has to stand here and be exactly this tall, with its leaves moving in just this way. That far off in one corner, behind a window, people should sit drinking coffee from exactly this kind of cup. That a couple with a little dog should walk past, at precisely this rhythm.” As the scene unfolded, she went on, “I realized that, even though I was playing the lead, I was no more important in the frame than that tree, or these passersby, or that particular building. All of it exists in order to create a larger whole.”
To date, no other independent Russian feature film has devoted itself to the subject of the war. “People are afraid to talk about reality, afraid to talk about the present—they simply don’t know how to write a screenplay or direct a film about these subjects,” Anton Dolin, a Russian film critic and a friend of Zvyagintsev’s, told me. “If, instead of war, we were living through, let’s say, an ecological catastrophe, Andrey would probably be the only one making a film about that, too. Reality is painful for him, but he’s not afraid of it.”
Ultimately, Gleb is forced to make an offering to the state: fourteen draftees for the war. The number is a gesture at the movie’s titular allusion. According to Greek mythology, every nine years Athens had to send fourteen young people to the Minotaur’s labyrinth, in Crete, where they were devoured as sacrificial victims. The implication is that power preserves itself at the expense of its subjects. Zvyagintsev paraphrased Gleb’s reaction to being drawn into Russia’s war effort: “Damn, why do I have to deal with this?” Gleb, he went on, “wants to stay on neutral ground, to not get involved, to keep from getting sucked into this nightmare.”
Zvyagintsev and I met this summer in Jurmala, a charming Latvian resort town on the Baltic Sea. He had filmed “Minotaur” in Riga, Latvia’s capital, a thirty-minute drive away, and was now spending a month at a rented house on a quiet lane, with a footpath leading through a patch of pine trees to the shore. “Minotaur” would have its theatrical release in the fall—November 20th in the United States—and Zvyagintsev was at work on a book about his directorial career. He treated my visits as a welcome distraction, and we spent the better part of several afternoons sitting in wooden deck chairs, nursing a pot of tea, and munching on local strawberries.
Zvyagintsev is sixty-two years old, with a shadow of a silver beard and chunky black eyeglasses. His gaze is intense yet fundamentally kind—he would regularly check to see if I was cold, hungry, or in need of a ride. He is intimidatingly well read, in the way of the Russian intelligentsia—one evening, at a garden party, I spotted him reading a translation of the Aeschylus play “The Persians”—but without coming across as haughty or pretentious. Zvyagintsev, unlike many prominent Russian filmmakers, was not born into the country’s cultural élite: he grew up in Novosibirsk, in Siberia, and was brought up by a single mother who taught Russian language and literature at a local school. Zvyagintsev “comes from below,” and is interested in the world of ordinary people, Dolin told me. “In the lives of mechanics and plumbers, he sees something mythological.”
One evening, I met Zvyagintsev at a restaurant with a long terrace overlooking the sea. I arrived early, and, as I waited, he sent me a text message about where we should sit: “Ask whether the table in the corner is free—not the one diagonally across, all the way in the back, but just opposite the entrance. That spot is nice: it’s by the window, you get the sunset, and there’s more air than in the middle of the room.”
Over dinner, I asked him about his childhood in Novosibirsk. Zvyagintsev’s father abandoned the family when Zvyagintsev was five years old. “A man of no fixed occupation,” Zvyagintsev said. He was a sculptor, a high-school gym teacher, a police officer. Then, one day, he was gone. Still, Zvyagintsev recalled an otherwise happy childhood in the Soviet Union of the nineteen-sixties and seventies: hanging out in the courtyard of his apartment block, playing soccer with friends, performing at a local youth theatre. When he was eighteen, his father made an unannounced visit to the apartment where Zvyagintsev lived with his mother. They exchanged an awkward hug but barely spoke. Zvyagintsev later learned that his parents had argued that day. His father asked his mother what Zvyagintsev was up to. She said that he was studying acting, at a drama academy in Novosibirsk. His father erupted. “What kind of nonsense is that?” he said, slamming his fist on the kitchen table.
Hearing about the exchange, Zvyagintsev told me, had produced relief: “What a joy that this person is absent from my life, that I don’t have to overcome this negativity.” His mother was open to his artistic pursuits and supportive of his move, at the age of twenty-two, to Moscow, where he enrolled at the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts, known by its acronym, GITIS, the country’s oldest and largest theatre school.
It was the late eighties, the time of perestroika, a period of loosening state controls and burgeoning freedoms. Students at GITIS organized a boycott of a mandatory class on Marxism and Leninism. “By then, everyone knew Communism was over,” Zvyagintsev said. “Why listen to all this bullshit?” Zvyagintsev had a friend who attended the Institute of Cinematography, Moscow’s prestigious film school, which had a theatre that screened movies otherwise impossible to find in the Soviet Union. The friend would sneak Zvyagintsev in through a back entrance to see such films as Orson Welles’s “The Trial” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”
One day, Zvyagintsev attended a screening of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Avventura,” which is nominally about the disappearance of a young woman during a yacht tour off Sicily. Antonioni’s great innovation was that the story line fades away, along with conventional expectations about action, time, and dramatic resolution. Psychological tension and narrative development come not from plot but from silence, duration, landscape, and movement. “My mind was blown,” Zvyagintsev said. “I understood then that a film can be incredibly rich and meaningful even when hardly any action happens.”
After graduation, Zvyagintsev found a job as a dvornik, a street cleaner. “You’d get up early in the morning, sweep up some cigarette butts, and the rest of the day belonged to you,” he said. He spent most afternoons at the newly opened Museum of Cinema, which hosted retrospectives on German Expressionists and the French New Wave, and regularly showed the works of modern auteurs, from Fassbinder to Kurosawa. The idea of making films of his own still seemed far-fetched—that was for people with the right diplomas and connections. But then, when Zvyagintsev was twenty-seven, the Soviet Union collapsed, taking with it a rigid system of top-down management and state-directed job assignments. “It was a tremendous time,” he said. “Everyone was free to do as they pleased, try out what they liked.”
Eventually, he began to direct commercials—for a shoe store, a granite workshop, the soccer club Spartak. Through a campaign for REN TV, an independent television network launched in the mid-nineties, he met Dmitry Lesnevsky, who ran the channel with his mother. At the time, Lesnevsky was looking for directors to work on “The Black Room,” a psychological drama series, with each episode unfolding in a confined, claustrophobic space. The minimalist format was a necessity, Lesnevsky told me, because “we didn’t have the money to make real films.” He gave Zvyagintsev a handful of scripts, and Zvyagintsev picked one about a wealthy banker and his bodyguard. He filmed it quickly, on a budget of a couple of thousand dollars. “To my amazement, from this rather absurd and ridiculous premise appeared something with style, air, atmosphere—everything we would see later in Andrey’s films,” Lesnevsky said. Zvyagintsev remembers Lesnevsky telling him, “Good job, you turned shit into candy.”
Lesnevsky hired him to make two more episodes. “I can’t take credit for discovering Andrey Zvyagintsev,” he told me. “People with talent like his arrive to this world with their mission already defined, and sooner or later they carry it out.”
“Lamentation Over the Dead Christ,” an Italian Renaissance masterwork by Andrea Mantegna which shows Christ lying on a marble funeral slab, is known for its extreme foreshortening. Christ’s feet are closest to the viewer, and his head and torso are enlarged beyond normal proportions. The effect is highly corporeal, a naturalistic confrontation with the immediacy of death. Zvyagintsev first saw the painting in an art-history class at the drama academy in Novosibirsk. It inspired a framing shot that comes nine minutes into “The Return,” Zvyagintsev’s first full-length feature: two brothers tiptoe into a hallway, having learned that their father, who has been missing for twelve years, has come home.
Mikhail Krichman, the film’s director of photography, who has worked on all of Zvyagintsev’s subsequent projects, told me that they spent close to an hour swapping out lenses to get the perspective exactly right, and ultimately set up the camera outside the bedroom where the brothers discover their father asleep. Zvyagintsev described the shot as the film’s “tuning fork,” a way to establish its tone. “I needed to find a certain register,” he told me. “A way to lift the story above the mundane, so that it would transcend everyday realism and reach for the mythical.”
“The Return,” based on another script procured by Lesnevsky, was filmed near Lake Ladoga, north of St. Petersburg. The landscape is dotted with abandoned structures, decaying artifacts of a vanished civilization: a diving platform looming over a glassy lake, a rickety wooden observation tower. The father takes his two sons—Ivan and Andrey—on a camping trip that becomes something of a Biblical quest, a test of will and belief. The action, like God’s creation of the world, takes place over seven days. Ivan, the younger son, is doubtful and skeptical of his father, whereas Andrey, the elder, is faithful and trusting—the twin archetypes of man’s relation to the divine. “Two neophytes going through an initiation rite,” Zvyagintsev said. The film ends in tragedy: a death that is both sacrifice and atonement. We never learn the father’s name.
“The Return” was largely panned by critics in Russia. One wrote that the film revealed nothing more than a “commonplace truth,” and was so banal that it resembled “the skeleton of an animal picked clean by vultures.” Lesnevsky feared that the project was destined to air once or twice on REN TV and then effectively disappear. Zvyagintsev received one unexpected review: a woman who introduced herself as his half sister wrote to say that his father had seen the film on TV in Siberia. After it ended, he’d taken a cigarette out to the balcony of his apartment, where he’d stayed, on a frosty autumn evening, for the next two hours.
In September, 2003, “The Return” was shown at the Venice Film Festival, where it won not only an award for best début but also the Golden Lion, the festival’s top prize. Two months later, Zvyagintsev got a call from the Kremlin, inviting him to meet with Putin, who was then in his first term as President. “There will be tea, something to eat—you’ll sit down and have a chat,” Zvyagintsev said, recalling the summons. In a reception room at Putin’s residence, facing a suite of television cameras, the two had a scripted conversation that lasted barely a few minutes. “He said, ‘Congratulations,’ and that was it,” Zvyagintsev said. “The camera crews left.”
Afterward, he and Putin were chauffeured to a meeting at Mosfilm, the country’s largest and most historic movie studio. “It was an ordinary, human conversation between two people,” Zvyagintsev said, of the drive. “Putin wasn’t yet what he later became. He was still mostly an unknown quantity.” At Mosfilm, Putin presided at a large table, surrounded by titans of Russian cinema. “They were all sitting there, waiting to hear what His Majesty was going to say,” Zvyagintsev said. “I found the whole context of the meeting befuddling.” Later, Kremlin officials suggested that Zvyagintsev take part in various public committees or initiatives, but he always declined. “Purely decorative, empty busywork,” he called it. “Perhaps it sounds naïve, but I have never considered myself a political animal.”
Zvyagintsev’s indifference to official power made him unusual for a Russian artist, especially in the age of Putin. Filmmaking is expensive, and for many people in the industry the Russian government is both a source of funding and a powerful facilitator. “Plenty of other directors would have pissed themselves with happiness,” Lesnevsky said. “But for Andrey it was awkward, as if one imperious nod from the tsar in his direction risked casting a shadow on the purity of his artistic expression.”
On June 4, 2004, Marvin Heemeyer drove what the media later dubbed the “Killdozer” on a two-hour rampage through the streets of Granby, Colorado. Heemeyer owned a muffler shop in the town and had been engaged in a long-running series of property and zoning disputes with local authorities. He eventually lost, and then spent several months converting a bulldozer into an improvised armored vehicle, adding steel plates and gun ports. His spree ended when the Killdozer got stuck in the wreckage of a collapsed building; as police approached, Heemeyer shot himself. Zvyagintsev heard about the story during a trip to New York. “This initial impulse, the basic conflict, made quite an impression,” he told me. “The desire for revenge, a thirst for retribution, for justice.”
Back in Moscow, he and Oleg Negin, a frequent collaborator, began drafting the screenplay for what would become his fourth feature, “Leviathan,” a story of a man’s confrontation with an indomitable system, framed around his battle to save his home from demolition at the hands of corrupt local bureaucrats. In an early version, Zvyagintsev imagined a final scene in which Nikolay, the Russian Heemeyer, bursts out of his garage riding a bulldozer and uses it to topple an excavator. But that felt both too technically complex—“Who was going to give us an excavator to destroy?” Zvyagintsev said—and tonally wrong. His world view is harsher. “In Andrey’s films, God is silent and never intervenes,” Alexander Rodnyansky, Zvyagintsev’s longtime producing partner, said. “No one is granted miracles or hears a voice from Heaven, and no one is saved.”
One of Zvyagintsev’s references for the film was an early-nineteenth-century German novella, “Michael Kohlhaas,” by Heinrich von Kleist, in which the title character, a horse trader, is wronged by a member of the Saxon aristocracy. He turns to the courts, but his appeals are quashed because of the aristocrat’s political connections. Desperate, Kohlhaas mounts an armed uprising, which is quickly put down, and the story ends with his beheading. “There is always an aristocracy of some kind, in every society,” Zvyagintsev said. “There are people who are allowed to do certain things, and people who aren’t.”
After “The Return,” Zvyagintsev had made “The Banishment,” an elusive film that was considered something of a sophomore slump, about a troubled couple who abscond to an unnamed countryside. Next came “Elena,” a propulsive drama set in Moscow which a favorable review in the Times described as “a jungle teeming with predatory wildlife.” The film was a critical success and marked an important turn in Zvyagintsev’s cinematic vocabulary: he retained an allegorical dimension but grounded the action in the gritty, recognizable texture of contemporary Russia.
For the location of “Leviathan,” Zvyagintsev considered several towns outside Moscow, and some as far away as Belarus. Nothing felt quite right, though, until Andrey Ponkratov, Zvyagintsev’s longtime production designer, discovered Teriberka, a remote Arctic fishing settlement on the northern coast of Russia’s Kola Peninsula, which Zvyagintsev called an “outpost of archaic reality.” The coastline is severe, with boulder-strewn beaches and granite cliffs stabbing into icy waters. Away from the shore, the tundra is barren, a broad expanse of moss, lichen, and exposed rock. When Zvyagintsev first visited Teriberka, in 2012, a local driver told him about humpback whales that, in early summer, are visible from shore. Zvyagintsev thought it was a sign: “We came with a film called ‘Leviathan,’ and it turns out this place has actual whales.”
The film’s central motif came from the Book of Job, the story of an upright, God-fearing man who faces tragedy and suffering seemingly without reason. The Biblical story speaks elliptically of a Leviathan, a giant sea creature beyond human control: “Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.” To Zvyagintsev, modern Russia looked like the embodiment of yet another “Leviathan”—that of Thomas Hobbes, who imagined the sovereign state as an immense power entrusted by its subjects to protect them from disorder and violence. In Zvyagintsev’s film, the state machine, rather than protect the individual, crushes him. That’s a universal dynamic, Zvyagintsev insisted, “only in Russia it’s more blatant, visible right on the surface.”
“Leviathan” is unmistakably a critique of the venality and cynicism of the Russian state. In a courtroom scene, a judge races through a ruling that favors the authorities, reading it in a nearly unintelligible monotone. Zvyagintsev had taken inspiration from the verdict in the trial of Pussy Riot, the feminist punk collective whose members were arrested and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” after staging a protest in Moscow’s central Orthodox cathedral, in 2012. “I was struck by the speed of it, the way the judge rattled through the decision so incredibly fast,” Zvyagintsev told me. He asked the actress playing the judge, Alla Emintseva, to watch the footage. “I need you to do it like that,” he told her.
Before “Leviathan” premièred, at the Cannes Film Festival, in 2014, Zvyagintsev and Rodnyansky hosted a private screening at the Russian Ministry of Culture, which had provided more than a million dollars of the film’s budget. The funding was less a financial necessity than a political wager. “It seemed to me that simply having the words ‘Made with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation’ in the opening credits would protect us and provide a certain degree of cover,” Rodnyansky said. The Minister of Culture at the time, Vladimir Medinsky, was a conservative ideologue. After watching the film, he called Zvyagintsev into his office. “Why do you insist on painting Russia with a black brush?” he asked. “Why not use brighter colors?” Zvyagintsev replied that an artist merely represents the reality around him. “We’re not in charge—you are,” he said. “When life gets better, when things in the country change, then there will be a brighter side, and I’ll reflect that, too.”
Weeks later, “Leviathan” won the award for best screenplay at Cannes. It went on to win a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and earn an Oscar nomination. In Russia, the film was viewed widely—a pirated copy that circulated online before the theatrical release was downloaded more than a million times—and fiercely debated. The culture ministry distanced itself from the movie. “What and whom Zvyagintsev hates is more or less clear,” Medinsky said in an interview with a pro-Kremlin newspaper. “But whom does he love? Fame, red carpets, and statuettes.” A lawmaker called on the state to claw back the money it had given to produce “Leviathan,” which he said was “a collection of Russophobic stereotypes aimed at creating a negative image of the Russian state and Russian society.”
In our conversations, Zvyagintsev maintained a certain detachment from the controversy. “Once a film is finished, the closing credits are in place, the master print is approved—that’s it, you’re free,” he told me. “From then on, everyone watches it through the lens of their own experience.” Medinsky, for his part, changed the state’s policies for film funding in the wake of “Leviathan.” “I see no point in using Ministry of Culture funds to produce movies that spit on our elected government,” he said. “I’m talking about those individuals whose films take the view of Rashka govnyashka”—Russia is a shithole.
On the morning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022, Zvyagintsev was in a hospital room in Germany. The previous June, during a COVID wave in Moscow, his wife, Anna Matveeva, a photographer and a film editor, had caught the virus, and Zvyagintsev, who had a long-standing lung condition and was fearful of falling ill, went to stay in his office. After a week, he decided to get a shot of Sputnik V, Russia’s COVID vaccine. Within days, his temperature had spiked and he was racked with body aches and exhaustion. His doctor sent some blood samples for analysis. “Every single measure was wildly abnormal,” Matveeva told me. Zvyagintsev was told he likely had an asymptomatic COVID infection that had been exacerbated by the vaccine.
To this day, his precise diagnosis remains a mystery. “I don’t mean to sound like an anti-vaxxer,” Zvyagintsev said, “but draw your own conclusions.” Whatever the cause, Zvyagintsev was undergoing a cytokine storm, in which immune cells trigger a potentially deadly inflammatory response. He checked into a hospital in Moscow, where doctors performed a plasma transfer and delivered an intravenous infusion of monoclonal antibodies, to stem the inflammation. After two weeks, they sent him home. Several days later, a blood clot burst in his neck. He told Matveeva, “Honey, I’m fucked. I’m dying,” and then collapsed.
An ambulance brought him to a different hospital, where he contracted a bacterial infection. Tests showed that he had damage to ninety-two per cent of his lungs; he was placed on a ventilator. Matveeva consulted with the doctors. They suggested a lung transplant, a risky procedure that, even if it was successful, lacked a clear long-term prognosis. One doctor pulled Matveeva aside to speak with her privately. He said that she should consider taking her husband to Germany for specialized medical care. “I’m telling you honestly,” he said. “We’re not able to manage it here.”
On August 17th, about seven weeks after Zvyagintsev first fell ill, he was flown to Hannover, Germany, where doctors at a university hospital put him into a medically induced coma. “A huge dark blur,” he told me, of the experience. They used a bacteriophage, a type of virus that targets bacteria, to bring his blood markers back to normal. A month later, he woke up unable to move his arms and legs. “I was just lying there, motionless,” he said.
Zvyagintsev spent the next three months learning to breathe without a tube, to sit up, to feed himself. Then the war broke out. He joined a number of Russian cultural figures in speaking out against the invasion. “I have no words, no productive thoughts, no ideas, just one proclamation,” he said in a video address, his voice hoarse and weak. “No to war.” Later, he addressed fellow-artists who might be tempted to remain silent: “What are you even doing here, taking up space in the world, if you can’t speak about what you believe ought to be said?”
That summer, he moved to Paris with Matveeva and their son, Petr, who was twelve at the time. Zvyagintsev was still in a wheelchair, but he eventually progressed to using a walker. Chapron, the French film historian, introduced him to Nathanaël Karmitz, the head of MK2, a French film studio and distributor. “When he understood that he survived, he wanted to go on,” Chapron said. “Which meant making movies, the only thing he knows.” At their meeting, Karmitz noticed that Zvyagintsev’s gait was still unsteady. “He almost died, left his home, had no money, and a wife and kid to support in France,” Karmitz told me. “Of course he was focussed on working again.”
Zvyagintsev’s most recent film at that time, “Loveless,” about the estrangement of a married couple, Zhenya and Boris, and the disappearance of their twelve-year-old son, had been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. In the final scene, Zhenya and Boris, living apart, are watching the same state-television broadcast, a hysterical propaganda segment about supposed fascists taking power in Ukraine. It’s hard not to connect Zhenya and Boris’s inclination to wound each other with the violence of the Russian government, especially toward Ukraine. “Loveless” came out in 2017, five years before the invasion, and, viewed today, it carries a dark sense of foreboding. “The point isn’t that propaganda makes people lose their empathy,” Zvyagintsev told me. “It simply helps them remain in that condition.”
After “Loveless,” Zvyagintsev began developing a project about a Russian oligarch whose proximity to the state leads to his downfall. He called it “Jupiter,” after the Roman king of the gods, a figure of supreme power and authority. According to Ilya Stewart, the film’s producer, a fund established by Roman Abramovich, one of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs, had signalled a willingness to help finance the film. But, three months before shooting was set to begin, the fund declined to provide support. “We were told the economics didn’t make sense,” Stewart said. “In hindsight, I think it’s obvious that people were scared, even if they never said so directly.”
Zvyagintsev had hoped to resurrect “Jupiter” in France, but Karmitz thought that it would be too expensive and “too visionary” for a general audience. “I feared people wouldn’t relate to the figure of the oligarch,” he said. So Zvyagintsev instead returned to an idea that he’d had years earlier—remaking a French classic. He’d asked Chapron for a list of iconic films from the nineteen-sixties and seventies that centered on a marital drama. Chapron suggested nine titles, including films by François Truffaut and Jacques Deray. Eventually, Zvyagintsev settled on Chabrol’s “La Femme Infidèle.” What an interesting title, he recalled thinking—it says it all before the film has even begun, “as if to ruin the intrigue.” Suspense would have to come not from a central mystery but from the experience of watching the characters observe one another. “A kind of game,” Zvyagintsev said.
Zvyagintsev knew that he would set the film in Russia, and, as with “Elena,” “Leviathan,” and “Loveless,” would overlay myth and allegory on a contemporary story. When he’d first conceived of the idea, nearly a decade earlier, that could have meant any number of things; in 2023, it could mean only war.
In the weeks following Putin’s partial mobilization, Zvyagintsev had got a call from an acquaintance, a successful businessman in the Russian provinces. “I had the sense that he wanted to share this story with someone, maybe in his own circle, but didn’t find anyone,” Zvyagintsev said. “So he told me.” The businessman said that he had been called to the mayor’s office and told he must provide names from among his workers for the draft lists. Zvyagintsev asked the acquaintance how he had responded. “He said something along the lines of ‘Well, Andrey, you know,’ and trailed off,” Zvyagintsev recalled. The details were a matter for the businessman’s conscience, Zvyagintsev told me. But he had heard enough.
For Zvyagintsev, making a movie in Europe meant relearning much of his usual process. In Russia, Rodnyansky, his producer, had protected him from the fraught and unseemly aspects of securing financing. “He spoiled me,” Zvyagintsev said. “If he said yes, then that was enough.” But, in Europe, art-house dramas of the type Zvyagintsev makes are financed piecemeal, through an arrangement of co-producers, public subsidies, broadcasters, and private investors. “How much do things cost, how to find the money to pay for them, how to find outside investors and present your ideas to them—none of that existed for him back in Russia,” Karmitz said. “Andrey had to learn an entirely new system.”
In the end, “Minotaur” became a French-German-Latvian co-production, with additional money from private Russian-speaking investors in Europe. Then, there was the question of whom he would work with. “Andrey is a man of habit,” Karmitz said. “Habits in terms of how he works, the people he works with, how they make art together.” Negin, Zvyagintsev’s longtime writing partner, was still in Russia. So he asked Simon Lyashenko, a former I.T. executive with whom he had collaborated on some side projects, to help write the script. Lyashenko told me, “He placed such trust in me, which made me feel an equally enormous responsibility toward him.”
Many of the actors Zvyagintsev had initially considered for roles in “Minotaur” were in Russia. He told me that a number of them, in private conversations, said that they couldn’t participate in a film that honestly addressed the war. “Each simply wanted to apologize,” he said. When I tried to contact the actor who played Nikolay in “Leviathan,” Alexey Serebryakov, he declined to speak with me, then deleted our text exchange. Zvyagintsev wasn’t surprised. “Artists have to find a way to survive, stay off blacklists, preserve their ability to work,” he said.
Others went further. Roman Madyanov, who played the mayor in “Leviathan,” became an outspoken supporter of the war before his death, in 2024. He told a Russian paper that cultural figures who leave the country “spit on the graves” of their forebears and “have a bleak future ahead of them.” Zvyagintsev seemed surprised when I told him about Madyanov’s turn. “Seriously?” he asked. “It’s disappointing, of course, but I don’t judge anyone.” Such people in Russia are in a “dependent position,” he said. “It’s a form of serfdom, really. Nothing has changed.”
Ultimately, Zvyagintsev cast an actor named Dmitry Mazurov as Gleb, the film’s lead character. Mazurov is forty-five, a veteran journeyman with more than a hundred screen credits. He insisted to me that, for him, “Minotaur” is not a film about the war, or its effect on Russian society, but, rather, a kind of chamber piece—“a love story,” he called it. “It’s about my character fighting for his wife, for his son, for the preservation of his family, in whatever flawed way he can.”
I had reached Mazurov in Moscow, where he lives. He acknowledged the political dimension of Gleb’s dilemma with the mayor, but said that the mobilization of 2022 was “just another period of life that we lived through,” a “historical fact” that “didn’t carry any special significance” for how he played Gleb. “Minotaur” was “a work of art, a very deep and interesting story,” he told me. “It certainly isn’t a manifesto.”
Riga, with its pre-Revolutionary buildings and rows of Soviet-era prefab housing blocks, provided a rather faithful replica of Russia. Only a few visual effects were added in post-production: Russian license plates on the cars and billboards offering four-hundred-and-ninety-five-thousand-ruble bonuses to anyone who joined the Russian Army. On set, Zvyagintsev didn’t discuss the war, which by then had been going on for almost four years. “Obviously, the war is horrific,” Shmykova, who plays the H.R. director at Gleb’s firm, told me. But, she went on, “I don’t think any of us needed to hear him pontificate on the subject to know what his views were.”
The central event in “Minotaur” is a nearly twenty-minute sequence of violence and its aftermath, gruesome and slapstick, all without dialogue. “It’s the kind of challenge that directors dream of,” Zvyagintsev told me. “I wanted to stretch that section out, make it as expansive as possible, show every detail.” The scene serves as an intimate and visceral analogy to the more diffuse horrors of war. “It lays it all bare,” Zvyagintsev said. “Everyone can see the blood being spilled.”
When “Minotaur” premiéred, last May, at Cannes, it received a ten-minute ovation and won the Grand Prix, the festival’s second-highest honor. Zvyagintsev knew that he’d get to deliver a short acceptance speech. “A chance, maybe the only one, to say what really mattered,” he said. “It won’t change anything. But you still have to do it.”
Onstage that evening, Zvyagintsev ran through a standard list of thanks. Then his tone shifted. “There is someone else I would like to address personally,” he said. “Millions of people on both sides of the front line dream of only one thing: for the massacres to stop. The only person who can stop this butchery is the President of the Russian Federation. Put an end to this carnage. The whole world is waiting for it.”
Two days later, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, addressed the speech at a Kremlin briefing, saying that Zvyagintsev had “no right to speak” about the war because he had not condemned Ukraine for its “bloody slaughter.” Zvyagintsev responded by giving a comment to Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet. “Yes, quite right,” he said. “I have no say in this, just as a hundred million Russians today have no say.”
In Jurmala, Zvyagintsev told me, “It is obvious which side I am on in ‘Minotaur’—certainly not on the side of the people who unleashed this hell.” But he insisted that his was a humanistic view, not a political one. “I want to remain outside all parties, alliances, associations,” he said. “What I know is that you must not kill another human being. You can’t fire a tank at an apartment building.” He mentioned Gleb’s dilemma: “The act of sending fourteen people to their deaths is fundamentally the same thing as what was done by those who sent an entire army to war.”
The Villa Rocabella, a colonnaded Belle Époque confection, sits on a sloping hillside near the French port city of Toulon, rising above terraced gardens and a private cove that opens onto the Mediterranean. One morning this August, I met Zvyagintsev in the villa’s living room, an airy space softened by linen and rattan, with tall French doors looking out to the sea. He was pacing, his arms clasped behind his back, and looked displeased.
Zvyagintsev had first visited the villa in 2019, while scouting locations for “Jupiter,” which he was again hoping to make. (“The figure of the oligarch has become more universal,” Karmitz told me.) But, in the intervening years, Villa Rocabella had changed owners. Zvyagintsev thought it looked shabbier, plainer, cheaper. “It’s starting to feel a bit like a sanatorium,” he said. Some art work and furniture had disappeared; a pair of palm trees that once framed the vista out to the sea were gone. “Those palms said something,” Zvyagintsev told me. “They conveyed something different about the place.”
Ponkratov, Zvyagintsev’s production designer, was also there, and the two men walked from room to room together. “You should enter a space and understand right away who this person is,” Ponkratov said. “Andrey loves shots that speak for themselves—no dialogue, simply silence, but we form an idea about what is happening.” In the villa, he and Zvyagintsev spoke in whispers, gesturing at an upstairs window where the oligarch would watch a woman walking in a garden, and at a glass-enclosed sitting room that Zvyagintsev called “the rotunda.” At one point, Ponkratov told me, of the oligarch, “It’s better not to make him some vulgar, tasteless nouveau-riche guy. He speaks well. He’s educated.”
Zvyagintsev quickly interjected: “Let’s not talk about the concept for now.” He told me that, given the film’s earlier false start, he was wary of revealing too much about it. “I’d prefer ‘Jupiter’ to be mentioned nowhere at all,” he said.
The day was hot and muggy, and late-nineteenth-century villas, however extravagant, don’t come with air-conditioning. (“We’ll have to shoot in November,” Zvyagintsev said.) After a while, he walked outside and took a seat on a stone bench overlooking the sea. He seemed more at ease than he had surveying the interior. Cinema, he told me, speaks in “a synthetic voice,” by which he meant the atmosphere that communicates the meaning of a scene. But it doesn’t materialize on its own. “Even something that happened accidentally while you were shooting doesn’t end up in the final cut by accident,” he said. “Everything is chosen—everything has a reason.” We talked a bit more about serendipity in art, how much to allow for the unexpected. “I never have a direct answer to any question right away,” he said. “I have to find it.”
A local camera crew had come to the villa to take a few test shots, so that Zvyagintsev could study the color and light and see what might be altered in post-production. They set up in the foyer, which was painted a soft pink and had a grand split staircase leading up to the second floor. The crew were not shooting anything to do with the film’s story, but they still needed people in the frame for color and contrast. Ponkratov volunteered, as did Lyashenko, who was working with Zvyagintsev on the script for “Jupiter.” Zvyagintsev told them where to stand, how to enter, where to walk. His posture straightened, and he announced, with a smirk, “The camera disciplines you.” ♦