O-C: Watching this movie, you can’t help but think you’re watching what is going on in this world today. I know you didn’t want to make a political film, but it sure makes you think.
OA: You are right, it’s not about politics. It’s about the modern modalities of power and how someone gets that power. Power has always been one and the same thing ever since the Roman Empire. Politics are about how you access and grab power, and once you have grabbed it how you keep it and that hasn’t changed an inch. What has been changing is propaganda. It is the way you manipulate how you fool people, how you fool them once, how you fool them twice and how you keep on fooling them. That’s what’s changed.
You have to invent new ways of fooling them and that changes with every generation, with every specific historical period. I had the impression that Giuliano’s book got that. He understands how politics, how propaganda and how postmodern politics have changed the world we live in, and he shows it exactly at the moment when it’s happening. He puts the stage exactly at the core of the nuclear reactor of modern politics.
O-C: Let’s talk casting and start with Paul Dano. Why was he the right choice to embody someone as intellectually complex and morally ambiguous as Vadim Baranov?
OA: I couldn’t think of someone who could do it better than him. I always admired Paul because I think he’s such a sensitive, profound, and smart individual. He’s also a complex individual. He has this kind of baby face, but at the same time he can be icy and scary. He can be seemingly honest and suddenly cynical. He can be telling the truth. With Paul you never know where the border is, where the line is and that’s exactly what I wanted for this role. That complexity, that profundity and that humanity, especially when he gets closer to power.
O-C: What do you think it takes to be a good spin doctor?
OA: I think you have to be genuinely evil (laughs). You have to speak with a fork tongue. Some people go into politics for their ideas, which is very respectable. Except when it’s not my ideas, I at least respect the honesty of it. You have people who get involved in politics out of cynicism, who see themselves as detached analysts. When you get involved in politics you are taking chances. You are taking risks, and you and you have to be involved. You can’t be detached.
O-C: Jude Law is almost unrecognizable as Putin. What was his initial reaction when you said, ‘I want you to play this man.’
OA: I honestly thought he would not even consider it. We’ve known each other for a while. We’ve been to film festivals together and we liked each other. Liking each other at a film festival means that we love the same films, and we agreed on a lot of films. We kind of stayed in touch and I always had in the back of my mind that one day I should make a film with Jude. When Putin came up, I didn’t want a lookalike. I thought that would be the wrong approach. I wanted a great actor to reinvent him. Instead of representing him from the outside, he would represent him from the inside. Jude can bring something profound, something powerful, something charismatic, which are the attributes of a character like Vladimir Putin, and I thought that he brought his own approach.
O-C: He certainly did.
OA: I don’t really direct actors. I let them do their homework. In this case I provided as much research as I could. I sent him documentaries, books, essays, whatever I could find. He also wanted to meet Guliano (the novelist) to discuss Putin with him. Jude has his own process of preparing so he became something else, which is absolutely not the Vladimir Putin I had in mind when I was writing, but I think it ended up being a much better, more interesting and more stimulating version of him that I initially envisioned.
