No fear of playing “the faceless man” Putin, says Jude Law in Venice | Venice Film Festival

It has long been considered one of the main heart throwing of the silver screen, but for its latest role in the political drama of Olivier Assayas, The Wizard of the Kremlin, Jude Law enters a much more prohibited figure: Vladimir Putin.

Law said that he was not imperturbable by the prospect of playing Vladimir Putin and that he did not hope for – he hoped “not naively” – fearing no repercussion.

Speaking at a press conference before the first of the film at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday, the winner actor of Bafta said: “I felt confident, in Olivier’s hands [the director] And the script, that this story was going to be told intelligently and with nuance and consideration.

“We are not looking for controversy for controversy. He is a character in a much wider story. We are not trying to define anything.”

The film is an adaptation of the successful book by Giuliano Da Empoli of the same name and revolves around Vadim Baranov, a Russian Russian doctor (played by Paul Dano) who smoothes Putin’s ascent in power in the 1990s. The character was inspired by a real fixer, Vladislav Surkov, which was key to shaping the Russian political strategy.

Dano, when asked if he had found positive points in his character, said: “I don’t think you had to look for a positive, but I think you have to be willing to discover the character’s point of view. If you simply label a character like Baranov, it would be a simplicity on the massive outside, which does more harm than good. ”

Law said that one of the challenges he was confronted with was to portray an opaque figure whose closely controlled public image revealed little of the man behind.

“The delicate side for me was that the public face we see very, very little.

The film marks a start in English for Assayas, better known for the clouds of Sils Maria and the personal buyer. He co-stars Alicia Vikander, Tom Sturridge and Jeffrey Wright.

The time of his release, three years in the Russian war in Ukraine, attracted questions about the state of contemporary geopolitics.

Assayas, when asked if Russia had governed the world today, said: “The answer is no, but I understand the question. The film is a lot about the way modern politics, 21st century politics, was invented, and part of this raised evil of Vladimir Putin in Russia.”

The 70 -year -old said that politics had “changed majorly, especially for people of my generation”. “What is happening right now is not only terrifying, but it is even more terrifying by the fact that we have not really found the answer,” he said.

Wright said that the film had made him think of America’s place in the history and dangers of contemporary authoritarianism. “There is a specific Russian story, and here is a specific American story that contrasts with this,” he said.

“We had impulses towards fascism, impulses towards autocracy and all kinds of sins.

Elsewhere on Sunday, the American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch added his voice against Mubi after the distributor took an investor with close ties with the Israeli army.

Mubi co -produced the father of Jarmusch, mother sister, brother, who was presented on the Lido on Sunday and featured Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver, Charlotte Rampling, Indya Moore and others.

Jarmusch said that Mubi “was fantastic to work with the film” but that he was “disappointed and disconcerted by this relationship [with Israel]».

He said that as an independent filmmaker, he had taken money from various sources to finance his films. “I consider that all the money in the business is dirty money,” he said. “If you start to analyze each of these cinema companies and their financing structures, you will find a lot of unpleasant dirt. We could avoid it and not make films at all. But the films are how I wear what I like. Yes, I am worried.

Moore also spoke about the subject for a long time. “Since the beginning of the Palestinian genocide, there has been an incredible part of the creative war and the behind the scenes,” she said. “People try to know how to work in an ethical and non -empowering capacity.

“I think the kind of reasonable diligence that people try to do is a development process … We all try to sail on this subject.”

The director general of Mubi, Efe Cakarel, addressed criticism in an open letter earlier this month in which he declared that the accusations that it was an accomplice of the events in Gaza were “fundamentally in contradiction with the values ​​that we hold as an individual and as a business”.