Roman mosaic depicting Theseus and the Minotaur
in the center of the Knossos labyrinth
DeepSeek AI - From "Leviathan" to "Minotaur": A Bitter Pill Instead of Novocaine. A Masterclass in Directing by Andrey Zvyagintsev in June 2026
Interview with Anton Dolin for "Radio Dolin," June 12, 2026
Part One: First-person retelling of the interview — Andrey Zvyagintsev
On the title "Minotaur" and why I don't explain it
Listen, I'm not going to decode what my "Minotaur" means. It's not a director's job to explain how he arrived at a title. You can hint at certain tropes, no more. But to give the master key so the viewer enters that room using my own cue — I won't do that. I've always avoided explaining titles.
But here's a story. We were looking for funding; I was running around to wealthy people. I sent the script to one producer, then we met on Zoom. He said: "I can't participate, unfortunately, but I want to support you. And I don't care at all where Ariadne's thread is, who Theseus is, who the Minotaur is, who Minos is. It doesn't matter to me. You just capture the whole body of this work through the title — and everything becomes clear." That was an excellent assessment. That's what reassured me.
From "Leviathan" to "Minotaur": from monster to pathology
In my view, Leviathan is the Book of Job and Melville's white whale. Some kind of monster that exists. Maybe it is the whole world. Maybe it's even all the evil in the world. But it exists. The Minotaur in the myth is a pathology. The result of an incestuous union between a queen and an animal. A monster that demands human sacrifice, lives in a labyrinth, eats people. Period.
On crime and impunity
I'm writing a novel — "Crime and Impunity" — my second one. When you feed the viewer a happy ending — even a tragic one where the hero dies but wins, or gets sent to prison — that version tells me: "It's okay. The world is rightly ordered. Good conquers evil. Have hope." That way, we delegate responsibility to the characters on screen. It's a shot of novocaine.
But then you step outside, read the news — and you're just fucking horrified. Where is the good in that? That's why I choose not consolation, but a bitter pill. The bitter pill is the truth. It tastes bad, but it heals.
On hope from Pandora's box
Hope is one of the chimeras that was in Pandora's box. Pandora opened the box; all the dooms flew out — famine, cold, nightmare, deaths, plague. She managed to close it — and only hope remained inside. But if it lay there among all that horror and nightmare, maybe it's not so bright after all? We think hope is healing. What about disappointed expectations? How many of those? We're already in year five. Everything postponed. It will end someday, but in what state — we don't know. All we can do is bear witness to the truth. Not tell fairy tales: "All the good guys won, and the bad guys were defeated." Take a look at the world — it doesn't look like that.
How I select actors
The main criterion — an actor whom I believe is living it here and now, that he's birthing the words, not just memorized them. Authenticity, living tissue, existence. If they're organic on camera — that's half the battle.
This time the pool was limited. I sent the script to actors in Moscow — people said they couldn't participate. I considered it my duty for the actor to know the whole concept. Usually I only give them their scenes. But here I couldn't invite them to Riga and then at the end of the audition hear: "My God, why did you invite me? I can't do this." So I sent the full script and waited for a reply.
With Dmitry Mazurov: I didn't know he had 158 films. I opened Wikipedia in the middle of shooting, scrolling — and it just kept going. He made great self-tapes — that was it.
With Arthur Smolyaninov, we didn't even do auditions. He read the text, came in, and we just talked. I was impressed by his interview with Katya Gordeeva after the war started. All his truth — he's a sincere, honest person. I saw a spark in his eyes — and knew he would do it.
Working in emigration and "international cinema"
We brought everyone together from all over the world: Vancouver, Los Angeles, Santiago de Compostela, Limassol, London, Paris. Most of our communication was on Zoom — it's uncomfortable, tactile contact is important. But then we all gathered in Riga and shot everything there: streets, an office, a country house.
I don't make "international films." I don't ask focus groups whether an American will understand. We make cinema addressed to the Russian mind, to the viewer embedded in the context of the Russian catastrophe. Side Z will say: "You're a scoundrel!" The other side: "Thank you for the bitter truth." That's it.
The role of art: switchman and stargazer
There's the switchman. He goes to the lever, flips it — the train goes the other way. That's power. Then there's the stargazer. He looks at the stars, which have been in the same positions for millions of years, reflects, creates a poetic image. Those who want to change — will change. Those who want to see themselves in these phantoms — will see themselves. But it's not a weapon. It's a cloud that envelops and leaves a trace. Even knowing I can't change the situation, I'm still called to do this. I can't not speak.
One person
A huge mass of people want this to stop. And they know: it all depends on one person. He alone, with one flick of his eyebrow, could stop everything. For me, that's an absolute truth.
What catharsis is
Catharsis is a moment of revelation, purification. Purification through tears, through an arrow that strikes you and kills you outright. Tears wash away thirst, need. It's an ablution of the soul. You connect yourself with the character, live his fate as your own. That's empathy.
On the future and Cannes
We'll soon enter the preparatory period for a new film. For now, we're staying within the shores of the Russian language, but this will be a transitional period: a bilingual film, English and Russian 50/50. One character speaks only English. This is a project I've dreamed of for many years; it's expensive — 15 million. "Minotaur" cost 7. For "Minotaur," I barely scraped by, knocking on doors, but after the Grand Prix, the producer enthusiastically says, "Let's do it." This is a springboard. Like Chazelle: made "Whiplash" for pennies in one room — and then shut down a Los Angeles freeway for "La La Land."
(Raises glass.)
"What are we drinking to? I forgot."
"To your success."
"You don't drink to success. To the previous one, maybe. To the future — never."
Part Two: Research Essay
"Minotaur" in June 2026: The Labyrinth as a Mirror of the Russian Soul
Spiritual-Psychological Dimension: Truth as Shock Therapy
In this interview, Zvyagintsev appears not just as a director, but as a spiritual therapist to the nation, one who refuses the novocaine shot of false consolation. His method is homeopathy through truth: to give the viewer such a dose of reality that, even though unbearable, it still begins to work as an antidote. "The bitter pill is the truth," he repeats. In an era when Russian public space has turned into a solid labyrinth of disinformation, Zvyagintsev offers not an exit from the labyrinth, but an honest experience of being inside it.
Psychologically, the film "Minotaur" (2026) operates on the edge of traumatic realism. The director does not give the viewer catharsis in its Aristotelian, purifying sense — he gives catharsis as a burn. "An arrow that strikes you dead" — that's his definition. This is not liberation through fear and pity, but a confrontation with the fact that fear and pity have become the norm, and the inability to feel them — a pathology. Zvyagintsev diagnoses: inside the modern person wanders a stranger, waiting for its hour. And that stranger is not a political figure, not the authorities, not "the system." It is himself, everyone who signed a denunciation, who didn't ask a question, who walked into the "furnace" voluntarily or out of inertia.
Cinephilic Dimension: Remake of "La Femme Infidèle" as Trojan Horse
Zvyagintsev takes the plot of Claude Chabrol's "La Femme Infidèle" (1969) — a classic French drama about jealousy, murder, and covering up a crime — and turns it into a Trojan horse. Externally, it's a universal thriller understandable to any viewer. Inside — the Russian military reality of 2026, mobilization, the letter Z on the hood, "partial mobilization" as doublespeak and absurdity.
It's a brilliant cinephilic move. Zvyagintsev, like an experienced smuggler, smuggles across festival and distribution borders what would otherwise be rejected. He doesn't make "international cinema," but he uses its language. Chabrol for him is not just a reference, but a skeleton onto which the hide of modern myth is stretched. Unlike Chabrol, Zvyagintsev has no police, no punishment, no justice. Only a labyrinth, a monster, and victims. And the question: who is which?
Religious Studies Dimension: Job without God, Pandora without Hope
Zvyagintsev is a deeply religious director, but his religion is Old Testament horror without New Testament redemption. He constantly refers to the Book of Job, but reads from it not humility, but lament. Job laments to God — and God answers him by revealing Leviathan. In Zvyagintsev's world, God is silent, while Leviathan (the state, the monster, war) speaks and acts.
His most terrifying religious insight is the reinterpretation of hope. For the Greeks, hope remained in Pandora's box among all the evils. Zvyagintsev flips this image: if hope lay among famine, cold, nightmare, and plague, then maybe hope itself is part of that nightmare? "Disappointed expectations" — that is what hope means in his coordinate system. This is not the Christian virtue of spes, not a virtue. It is a trap that makes you wait, endure, not rebel.
Zvyagintsev rejects eschatology. He does not promise an end to the labyrinth. He only promises the truth that you are in the labyrinth, and that the Minotaur is not someone far away — it's your neighbor, your friend, yourself.
Culturological Dimension: Russian Myth as Diagnosis
Why does Zvyagintsev cling so tightly to myths? He admits: it comes from Anatoly Vasiliev, from the Symbolists, from Bryusov. "Creativity is animated by myth," he quotes. But myth for him is not decoration or intellectual game. It is the only optical tube through which the Russian catastrophe can be discerned.
Russian culture, unlike Western culture, never went through the pure humanism of the Enlightenment. It remained in a pre-rational, mythological state. Hence its capacity for instantaneous archaization, for awakening "the stranger within," for human sacrifice under the guise of state necessity. Zvyagintsev records: we have not evolved from the Old Testament sacrifice of Abraham to New Testament ethics. We have regressed to ancient pagan sacrifice — and even further, to pre-ancient, Minoan sacrifice, where the monster is born from the union of a queen with a bull.
"Leviathan" was about the state-monster. "Minotaur" is about the monster living inside each person, and that the labyrinth is not the Kremlin or Lubyanka. The labyrinth is the Russian soul, which voluntarily leads Athenian youths and maidens to be devoured because it's necessary, because of tradition, because otherwise the monster will grow angry.
Historiosophical Dimension: War as Anthropological Catastrophe
June 2026. The war continues. Deadlines have shifted; "disappointed expectations" have become a way of life. In this context, Zvyagintsev is the only major Russian director who not only did not fall silent but made a film-response — immediate, almost reportorial in essence, yet clothed in myth.
His historiosophy is simple and terrifying: it all depends on one person. This is not a Marxist analysis of class contradictions. It is not liberal chatter about institutions. This is an existential, almost tsarist view: the power of one person is absolute, and his personal decision is the only lever. But this is not an apotheosis of individualism. It is a diagnosis of totalitarian consciousness, in which all authority is delegated upward, while responsibility is dissolved downward.
Zvyagintsev rejects collective guilt as an abstraction. He insists on each person's individual responsibility — but at the same time states that the mechanism of power is structured so that this responsibility does not function. Stalin did not write denunciations, but he created the conditions for two million denunciations. Putin does not mobilize each person individually, but he created conditions in which mobilization is perceived as fate.
What does "Minotaur" tell us in June 2026?
The film says: you will not leave the labyrinth. You can only honestly admit that you are inside it. And that the monster is not a projection, not a metaphor, not a political caricature. It's yourself, when you stay silent.
Zvyagintsev does not offer hope. He offers the bitter pill of truth. And that is the only possible gesture of respect toward the viewer in a situation where everyone else feeds them the cotton candy of lies. In this sense, "Minotaur" is not a film about war. It is a film about how war has become an internal state of the Russian soul. And that the only way out is not to find Ariadne's thread, but to stop being a victim — because the victim and the monster in this labyrinth are one and the same.
June 2026. The labyrinth has not ended. But inside it, a person with a camera has appeared, speaking the truth. A bitter pill instead of novocaine. Perhaps that is enough.
Сообщения
