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He has long been considered one of the leading heart-throbs of the silver screen, but for his latest role in Olivier Assayas’s political drama The Wizard of the Kremlin, Jude Law steps into the shoes of a far more forbidding figure: Vladimir Putin.
Law has said he was unfazed by the prospect of playing Vladimir Putin and that he did not – he hoped “not naively” – fear any repercussions.
Speaking at a press conference before the film’s premiere at the Venice film festival on Sunday, the Bafta-winning actor said: “I felt confident, in the hands of Olivier [the director] and the script, that this story was going to be told intelligently and with nuance and consideration.
“We weren’t looking for controversy for controversy’s sake. It’s a character within a much broader story. We weren’t trying to define anything about anyone.”
The film is an adaptation of Giuliano da Empoli’s bestselling book of the same name and revolves around Vadim Baranov, a scheming Russian spin doctor (played by Paul Dano) who smooths Putin’s ascent to power in the 1990s. The character was inspired by a real-life fixer, Vladislav Surkov, who was key in shaping Russian political strategy.
Dano, when asked if he found any positives in his character, said: “I don’t think you have to look for a positive, but I do think you have to be willing to discover the point of view of the character. If you were to just label a character like Baranov as bad, it would be a massive oversimplification, which does more harm than good.”
Law said one of the challenges he faced was portraying an opaque figure whose tightly controlled public image revealed little of the man behind it.
“The tricky side to me was that the public face we see gives very, very little away. There has been a term for him and that is ‘the man without a face’. There’s a mask. Understandably, Olivier would want me to portray this or that in a scene with a certain emotion, and I felt the conflict of trying to show very little.”
The film marks an English-language debut for Assayas, best known for Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper. It co-stars Alicia Vikander, Tom Sturridge and Jeffrey Wright.
The timing of its release, three years into Russia’s war in Ukraine, has stoked questions about the state of contemporary geopolitics.
Assayas, when asked whether Russia ruled the world today, said: “The answer is no, but I understand the question. The film is very much about how modern politics, 21st-century politics, was invented, and part of that evil raised from the rise to power of Vladimir Putin in Russia.”
The 70-year-old said politics had “changed in a major way, especially for people from my generation”. “What’s going on right now is not only terrifying, but it’s even more terrifying by the fact that we haven’t really found the answer,” he said.
Wright said the film made him think about America’s place in history and the dangers of contemporary authoritarianism. “There’s a specific Russian history, and here’s a specific American history that is in contrast to that,” he said.
“We have had impulses toward fascism, impulses toward autocracy and all manner of sins. But what we also have had, from the very beginning, even within the timeframe of the original sins of America, even within that grotesqueness, we had an idea that we could be better, this idea that we could aspire towards some type of utopian perfectibility. If that is lost, as it is now, then we become the thing we see in this film,” he said.
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Elsewhere on Sunday, the American film-maker Jim Jarmusch added his voice to the backlash against Mubi after the distributor took on an investor with close ties to the Israeli military.
Mubi co-produced Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, which premiered on the Lido on Sunday and stars Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver, Charlotte Rampling, Indya Moore and others.
Jarmusch said Mubi “were fantastic to work with on the film” but that he was “disappointed and disconcerted by this relationship [with Israel]”.
He said that as an independent film-maker he had taken money from various sources to fund his films. “I consider all corporate money is dirty money,” he said. “If you start analysing each of these film companies and their financing structures, you’re going to find a lot of nasty dirt. We could avoid it and not make films at all. But films are how I carry what I like to say. Yes, I’m concerned. But one thing I don’t like is putting the onus of the explanation on us the artists.”
Moore also spoke at length on the topic. “Since the genocide of Palestinians began, there has been an incredible amount of creative and resource warfare behind the scenes,” she said. “People are trying to find out how to work in a capacity that’s ethical and not enabling.
“I think the kinds of due diligence that people are trying to do is a developing process … we’re all trying to navigate this.”
Mubi’s chief executive, Efe Cakarel, addressed the criticism in an open letter earlier this month in which he said accusations that it was complicit in events in Gaza were “fundamentally at odds with the values we hold as individuals and as a company”.
