‘I did not know if I would ever be able to walk again, to live again as a normal person’

“I simply make films because I don’t know how to do anything else,” Andrey Zvyagintsev says. Which is fortunate for cinemagoers, as the Russian auteur’s new feature, after a traumatic hiatus, is the acclaimed Minotaur, winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes this year, almost a decade after his masterpiece Loveless won its Jury Prize.

“It’s one of the greatest things that’s happened to me over these last nine years,” he says of returning to the French film festival.

Born in Novosibirsk in 1964, Zvyagintsev trained as an actor at the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts, in Moscow. He worked on stage and in television and film before swerving to directing in 2000. His extraordinary feature debut, The Return, which won the Golden Lion at Venice International Film Festival, announced a thrilling new talent.

He followed up with The Banishment, Elena and Leviathan. Loveless followed in 2017. A devastating portrait of a disintegrating marriage and a missing child, it earned international acclaim and an Oscar nomination.

But in 2021 Zvyagintsev was struck down by a devastating bout of Covid-19 that left him fighting for his life, with severe lung damage and unable to walk, speak or sit unaided. He then reacted adversely to the Sputnik vaccine and was put into a medically induced coma for 14 days.

Hospitalised for 11 months, mostly in Germany, the film-maker eventually made what he describes as a miraculous recovery, during which he had to relearn even the most basic physical functions.

Zvyagintsev finally recuperated in Paris, the city he now calls home, before returning to a profoundly changed world.

He and his family left Russia in 2022, after his diagnosis. His son had attended a French-language school in Moscow, and his wife (and editor), Anna Matveyeva, also spoke French, making Paris an obvious destination. (Zvyagintsev describes himself as feeling somewhat displaced in France. Nonetheless, Minotaur is the country’s first Russian-language entry for the Academy Awards.)

“I did not know if I would ever be able to walk again, to live again as a normal person,” Zvyagintsev says. “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.”

Film-making remained his constant, even from his hospital bed. He worked hard, and fruitlessly, to get Jupiter, a big-budget story about a Russian oligarch, off the ground before pivoting to Minotaur, a loose remake of Claude Chabrol’s erotic thriller The Unfaithful Wife (La Femme Infidèle), from 1969. This was not a new idea for Zvyagintsev.

“I had tried to adapt the film many times,” the director says. “I was always interested in Chabrol’s films from the 1970s. This film in particular was elaborate and inventive in the way in which the story was constructed.

“It was also about the relationship between a husband and wife, and the way she tries to understand his every movement and thought, searching for patterns in his behaviour.

“Finally, someone from America who somehow discovered that I wanted to remake it contacted me to purchase the rights. And from that point everything started moving in the right direction.”

Chabrol’s film is a deceptively cool, extremely French study of marriage, sexual jealousy and murderous impulse. Set among the haute bourgeoisie, it follows a wealthy businessman who becomes suspicious that his wife is having an affair. When he discovers the identity of her lover, a private investigation gives way to a confrontation, with devastating consequences.

[ Cannes First Look review: Minotaur – Grim chronicle of a selfish, privileged class willing to look the other wayOpens in new window ]

In Minotaur – named after the half-man, half-bull, labyrinth-bound monster of Greek mythology – Zvyagintsev transplants this premise to a provincial Russia, retaining the triangle of husband, wife and lover but leaning into the moral decay of postcommunist Russia.

The director’s version, which he wrote with Simon Lyashenko, and is set in the autumn of 2022, follows a weaselly protagonist, Gleb Morozov (Dmitriy Mazurov), the wealthy chief executive of a shipping company, who lives with his wife, Galina (Iris Lebedeva), and their son in a modernist villa in a provincial town.

Their chilly marriage has long since lost its intimacy and lustre: Gleb is consumed by work, while Galina drifts through a joyless, privileged, domestic existence, finding escape in a clandestine affair with a dashing younger photographer, Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk).

Their marital miseries unfold against an escalating public crisis. As Russia mobilises for military action, the town’s mayor orders Gleb to provide the names of 14 employees to be sent for army recruitment. Facing mounting resignations from workers desperate to avoid conscription, he must decide which men to sacrifice to fulfil the quota.

Caught between professional obligation, vengefulness and self-preservation, Gleb happens upon a diabolical plan: recruit additional workers with the promise of high pay, only to send them away and save on the wage bill. It’s an erotic thriller reconfigured as political satire.

Zvyagintsev has fashioned many other compelling anti-heroes. The title character of Elena has to choose between her son and her wealthy husband; in Leviathan, a man’s fight against a corrupt mayor becomes a battle for survival; in Loveless, a self-involved couple’s bitter divorce coincides with the disappearance of their young son.

The director says he never thought of Minotaur’s deplorable anti-hero as fiendish.

“As a director you show the audience the hero, and the audience must find their own way of empathising with them,” Zvyagintsev says. “I think the important thing is that characters make choices for themselves. They become witnesses to their own decisions, whether those decisions work in their favour or against them.

“The risks emerge when a character makes a choice. At that point the energy of that decision moves towards the audience.”

At a time when Russian directors – Kirill Serebrennikov, Kantemir Balagov, Kirill Sokolov, Natalya Merkulova, Aleksey Chupov – have built impressive international reputations, no one has soared higher than Zvyagintsev.

But, when he talks about his craft, he often sounds more like a general than an auteur: “The process is driven by the strength and ambition of the entire crew – the film-makers, screenwriters, sound directors and everyone involved. Everyone contributes their own personal strength to the project. My illness hasn’t changed anything about how seriously we approach the film-making process.”

Many critics have, not unreasonably, paid attention to the Ukraine war in their analysis of Minotaur. Zvyagintsev himself chose to mark his Grand Prix win at Cannes – the award is the festival’s second-highest honour – with an appeal to Vladimir Putin to negotiate.

“Millions of people on both sides of the line of contact now dream of only one thing – that the massacres finally stop,” he said. “And the only person who can put an end to this meat grinder is you. Put a stop to this carnage; the whole world is waiting.”

It doesn’t matter how many takes are necessary to film a particular scene. The most important thing for me is that we achieve exactly what we’re looking for

When I speak to Zvyagintsev several months later, the director doesn’t want to talk about Putin or Ukraine, as he’d like the film to speak for itself.

He remains happy to talk about his intricate technical specifications and, in particular, his long-running collaboration with the cinematographer Mikhail Krichman.

Zvyagintsev’s fellow Russian has served as primary director of photography on nearly all his main works, including Minotaur, which features a bravado sequence that chronicles the affair, a murder (recalling the brutal excesses of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing) and the darkly comic business of body disposal.

Zvyagintsev was inspired by Dillinger Is Dead, the Italian director Marco Ferreri’s near dialogue-free thriller from 1969.

“We generally shoot between eight and 13 takes, more or less, although sometimes it can be 40,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how many takes are necessary to film a particular scene. The most important thing for me is that we achieve exactly what we’re looking for. Sometimes there are additional, unexpected happy accidents. That’s what makes a scene organic and real. We continue filming until we have that.”

His directing style is similarly exacting.

“There’s also something interesting that happens when actors repeat the same lines over and over,” he says. “You can sometimes see them becoming tired, but, at the same time, that exhaustion can become something very natural and organic. It’s almost as though the actor’s fatigue starts to become part of the character.”

He’s going to take another crack at Jupiter, his pet project, but remains philosophical about his prospects.

“Let’s just get this film out of the way. I have read too much Russian classical literature not to recognise that there is a transformation of human nature. I have to keep up with that transformation.”

Minotaur will be screened at Cork International Film Festival on Saturday, November 14th, and Saturday, November 22nd. It opens in cinemas on Friday, November 27th