Olivier Assayas

It was touchy politically.

The book was a bestseller, but turning that into a film that would be true to the talent of Giuliano, that was a tough endeavour.

Joo, sellanen kutina oli.

Alussa, et vaikee matsi, nahkapallo pyöri sormissa ja tuntu, et vastustaja pääs vähän iholle, et jäi kyllä vähän hiertää.

I was a little bit nervous about the material.

It was a lot of dialogue and I knew it was going to be trouble.

It takes place in Russia where we have no access.

It's supposed to be Russian spoken, but if it's spoken in Russian, the actors would lose their jobs forever.

And in any case, we wouldn't be able to finance it.

So we had to recreate Russia in Latvia.

and shooting in Latvia in winter is not the best experience in your life.

It was touchy politically.

I think it is about power, about how you manage to get power, and once you've got it, how you keep it.

And in the case of Vladimir Putin, how you keep it brutally.

But I think there was something universal.

It is about the transformation of modern politics.

more than about the specificity of the rise of Vladimir Putin.

That was certainly not what we wanted to do.

We represented Vladimir Putin as a human being and it deals with events that precede by a decade the invasion of Ukraine.

I mean, even if the war had