In the 2010s, Andrey Zvyagintsev asserted himself as one of his generation’s greatest filmmakers. The Russian native had already found wide acclaim for his 2003 debut The Return, but with the trifecta of 2011’s Elena, 2014’s Leviathan and 2017’s Loveless — all of which won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, and the latter two of which were nominated for the best-international-feature Oscar — his singular ability to tell intimate stories on an epic scale came into full view. Specifically: Uncompromising, brutally realist portraits of contemporary Russian society. 

Zvyagintsev’s momentum then stalled. Some potential future projects couldn’t get off the ground, but most importantly, the pandemic happened. The director was struck with Covid — and nearly died of severe lung damage, in an ordeal that took up 18 months of his life and saw him unable to move for a full year. He made what he describes as a miraculous recovery — “resurrected” in Paris, where he healed, to a very different world: His country had gone to war with Ukraine, in a grimly escalating situation. 

Ever determined to speak frankly about Russian life and culture in his films, Zvyagintsev was in turn inspired to make his next project — Minotaur, an adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 erotic thriller The Unfaithful Wife, co-written by Simon Lyashenko. The director had been trying to acquire the rights to that French-Italian classic long before the war broke out — but the timing turned out to be just right, as he was able to fuse his longstanding fascination with the material with a dark new chapter in his country’s history. 

In his first interview out of Cannes through a Russian-language interpreter, Zvyagintsev speaks about his unlikely return. 

It’s been nine years between this film and your previous feature, Loveless. I know you had some movies in the works and also fell quite ill. What can you say about what those years looked like?

For two years, we had been trying to make a film called The Opposite of Jupiter, which we started in 2018 or 2019, and tried to reanimate in 2020-2021. [The struggles] were all to do with the very high-cost budget of this project.

But most of this time was taken up, as you quite rightly mentioned, by my illness. It was a horrific illness, which took 18 months of my life. For 12 months, I could not get up, and it was all to do with Covid. So the pandemic really hit me hard. I was bedridden. I couldn’t move my hands. I couldn’t move my legs. I couldn’t use them at all. With what actually happened, you can consider this to be a complete and utter miracle. It took a lot out of me. As I refer to it, I was dead. Forty days of induced coma is almost the same as being dead. And after that, I resurrected. It was absolutely incredible. I can tell you honestly that 40 days of coma is not the best pleasure one can have and enjoy. You don’t exist. But gradually, very gradually, I started to adapt. I underwent a course of rehabilitation. In August 2022, I came from Germany to Paris in a wheelchair. I started moving, I started walking, and I started being myself again.

When it comes to a prolonged illness like that, can talk about how you felt as an artist and as a filmmaker on the other side? The way you describe it, it was such a profound, terrifying experience. It would have to change a person to some extent. 

It’s very difficult for me to talk about because I never tried consciously to dissect it, to analyze it, whether I was enriched by the experience or impoverished. I’m extremely happy to have resurrected. I then looked back on the projects, all the scripts that piled up on my desk, and tried to analyze, “What are these scripts and what are these projects?” and whether they’re still waiting for the hour when they will be made into films. I don’t really know whether they still are pertinent in our day and time. I can compare it to a millipede, where one of the tiny legs suddenly convulses and you don’t know what the result is going to be because of that little convulsion.

But I would not be honest with you if I said that I did not think about it at all, that I didn’t have any [new] feelings as a result of my illness. The main idea, or rather impulse and feeling, that I got from this experience was that one has to live in a fast lane. The frontier land where I found myself and the observations that I had after I came around to reality [had me] realize that I’m grateful to fate for this lesson — and the lesson being that you can’t really leave something for tomorrow. All the important decisions, all the projects, have to be realized ASAP. I’m not going to wait for procrastinating producers. I’m going to do it fast.

Minotaur is a loose adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 film The Unfaithful Wife. The setting is shifted to 2022. How did this come about?

We failed in 2018 to come to an agreement on obtaining the rights for adapting the script. I am very happy that we did not succeed back then in 2018. Otherwise the story would have been different. We decided to have the remake in Russia and within the Russian language. I’m grateful that it all happened in 2022, after the start of the war in Ukraine. That is exactly why the whole project moved forward. 

As to why I decided to choose this particular film for adaptation, I’ll tell you this story behind it: In this screenplay, there is a scene with not a single word being said. When you watch the film, you will see what I mean. I was completely mesmerized by that setup. This is exactly what cinegenesis is all about. If you have a 20 minute scene with all the details, all the essence, all the understanding, but not a single word said — this is really great filmmaking. This is the dream of every director. [Briefly turns to English] I think — that’s my opinion. [Laughs]

The actual disposition of characters — here I’d like to explain that probably in the French and in the English version, the film will be entitled Unfaithful Wife because that’s exactly where it all starts from the very first scene: a collision. We know that the husband, who is the main character, just stands as a by-passer and watches what is happening.

So how did the Russia-Ukraine war inform the adaptation, specifically? What inspired you to respond to it directly?

The film starts in September 2022 and this is probably the most tragic, the hardest, page in the history of the country. This is when the overall mobilization was declared in the country. What is happening between Russia and Ukraine, living in a world free from censorship — of course one can resort to making fairy tales about superheroes, one can refer to the language of [war], but not say what is happening behind your window. [For me] it would have been simply, absolutely impossible.

You shot this film in Latvia, as opposed to your previous films being shot in Russia. How did you find that experience? 

Not much was different. The creative team is from all over the world. Some are in LA, some in Spain, some in Vancouver, some in Cypress, one is in London. In Latvia, we found our partners, and then these partners have become our friends. Many people speak Russian in Latvia — 40% of the population is Russian speaking — and we had a team where the working language was Russian. We were very happy filming this way. 

Of course the relationship was new, the people were new, though the filming team is exactly the same. Latvia is a country which used to be part of the Soviet Union, and there are still pockets of it which are highly recognizable. Some of them, you couldn’t really distinguish between some godforsaken district of Moscow — the really run-down district of Moscow — or the suburbs. This is why we chose to film in Latvia, because we all realized that we couldn’t have done it in Russia. Filming in Russia now would be impossible.

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Minotaur premieres May 19 at the Cannes Film Festival.