Jude Law: “I wasn’t afraid to play Putin”

«I hope not to seem naive, but I have not feared repercussions. I felt sure that, in the hands of Olivier and the script, this story would have been told intelligently, with shades and attention ». Jude Lawarrived at Lido to present The wizard of the Kremlinin a calm voice he immediately clarifies what many wondered: he was not afraid to wear the role of Vladimir Putin. Nobody wanted to aim for media fuss: «We did not look for controversy for the taste of arguing. He is a character in a wider story. We were not trying to define anything about anyone ».

Olivier Assayas’s film, presented in competition at the Venice Film Festivalis taken from the novel of Giuliano da Empoli Which in France won the Grand Prix du Roman of the Académie Française. It is not a biopic, but a narrative halfway between reality and fiction that tells the climb and the consolidation of post-soviet Russian power. The story is seen through Vadim Baraovinterpreted by Paul Danopolitical councilor inspired by Vladislav Surkovarchitect of the Cremlin propaganda.

Assayas, who runs here in English here, explained that he did not want to tell a man, but a system, the story of the “transformation of politics during our life”. More: «The film speaks above all of how modern politics was invented. Part of that evil was born from the rise to the power of Vladimir Putin in Russia. We made a film about what has become politics and on the frightening and dangerous situation in which we all feel involved. This applies to many authoritarian leaders ». For the film, Assayas chose Riga, in Latvia, as a set, since shooting in Russia was impossible.

For Law, Putin was a “enormous role, an Everest to be climbed”. His interpretation is not an imitation: the actor builds a character who avoids caricatures and rather returns the measure of a silent leader, calculating, skilled in using the language of power. «Olivier and I discussed that he should not have been an interpretation of Putin and he did not want me to hide behind a prosthesis mask. We tried to find a similarity with me, “explains Law. “It’s incredible what a well -made wig can do.”

Next to him, in addition to Dano, there are Alicia Vikander, in the role of free Ksenia, Tom Sturridge, Will Keen and Jeffrey Wright. The script also bears the signature of Emmanuel Carrère, who worked with Assayas at the book adaptation process.

Paul Dano had the task of entering the mind of the man who manipulates everything, even the oppositions, to consolidate the power of the Tsar. He did it, he explains, without sleeves: «I don’t think it is necessary to look for a positive side, but you have to be willing to discover the sense of the character. If you simply label a character like Baraov as a bad guy, it would be an excessive simplification that would hurt more than well. We have to ask ourselves: why? ».

For Wright, The wizard of the Kremlin He doesn’t only talk about the Russian, but also about his country today. «This film speaks of a specific place, but has global implications for all of us. There is a specific Russian story and a specific American story. Yes, we had impulses towards fascism, autocracy and all sorts of sin. But what we had from the beginning, even within the original sins and that grotesque reality, was the idea that we could be better “, explains the actor. “If this is lost, as is happening now, we become what we see in the film.”

This year at the exhibition the theme of authoritarian power is not confined to Assayas’s film. On the screen, figures like Gaddafi appear in different forms – recalled by the documentary My Father and Qaddafi by Jihan K – and Ceaušscu, at the center of Milk Teeth by Mihai Mincan, set in the last days of the Romanian dictatorship. With DusePietro Marcello instead reports the public in Italy of the early twentieth century, when the air of fascism began to be felt. Sign of times: in an era of democracies under attack, cinema returns to the tyrants of history to show how power continues to feed on narratives and manipulations.