Zvyagintsev was inspired to make Minotaur, an adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 erotic thriller The Unfaithful Wife, co-written by Simon Lyashenko.

He had been trying to acquire the rights to that French-Italian classic long before the war broke out — but the timing turned out to be just right, as he was able to fuse his fascination with the material with a dark new chapter in his country’s history.

Nine years between this film and your previous one, “Loveless”

For two years, we had been trying to make a film called The Opposite of Jupiter, which we started in 2018 or 2019, and tried to reanimate in 2020-2021. The struggles had to do with the high-cost budget of this project.

But most of this time was taken up by my illness. It was horrific illness, which took 18 months of my life. For 12 months, I could not get up due to Covid. The pandemic really hit me hard. I was bedridden. I couldn’t move my hands and my legs. I couldn’t use them at all. With what actually happened, you can consider this to be a complete and utter miracle. It took a lot out of me. As I refer to it, I was dead. Forty days of induced coma is almost the same as being dead. After that, I resurrected. It was absolutely incredible. The 40 days of coma is not the best pleasure one can have. You don’t exist. But very gradually, I started to adapt. I underwent rehabilitation. In August 2022, I came from Germany to Paris in a wheelchair. I started moving and walking–I started being myself again.

It’s very difficult for me to talk about that because I never tried consciously to dissect it, to analyze it, whether I was enriched by the experience or impoverished. I’m extremely happy to have resurrected. I then looked back on the projects, all the scripts on my desk, and tried to analyze, whether they’re still waiting to be made into films. I don’t really know whether they still are pertinent in our time. I can compare it to a millipede, where one of the tiny legs suddenly convulses and you don’t know what the result is going to be because of that little convulsion.

The main idea, or rather impulse and feeling, that I got from this experience was that one has to live in a fast lane. The frontier land where I found myself and the observations that I had after I came around to reality [had me] realize that I’m grateful to fate for this lesson, The lesson being is that you can’t really leave something for tomorrow. All the important decisions, the projects, have to be realized ASAP. I’m not going to wait for procrastinating producers. I’m going to do it fast.

We failed in 2018 to come to an agreement on obtaining the rights for adapting the script. I am very happy that we did not succeed back then. Otherwise, the story would have been different. We decided to have the remake in Russia and in the Russian language. I’m grateful that it all happened in 2022, after the start of the war in Ukraine. That is exactly why the whole project moved forward.

In this screenplay, there is a scene without a single word being said. I was completely mesmerized by that setup. This is what cinegenesis is all about. If you have a 20-minute scene with all the details, all the essence, but not a single word said–this is really great filmmaking, the dream of every director.

The actual disposition of characters–probably in the French and in the English version, the film will be entitled Unfaithful Wife because that’s exactly where it all starts from the very first scene: a collision. We know that the husband, the main character, just stands as a by-passer and watches what is happening.

The film starts in September 2022 and this is probably the most tragic, the hardest, page in the history of the country. This is when the mobilization was declared in the country. What is happening between Russia and Ukraine, living in a world free from censorship — of course one can resort to making fairy tales about superheroes, one can refer to the language of war, but not say what is happening behind your window. For me it would have been simply, absolutely impossible.

You shot this film in Latvia, not Russia

But the relationship was new, the people were new, though the filming team is exactly the same. Latvia is a country which used to be part of the Soviet Union, and there are still pockets of it which are highly recognizable. Some of them, you couldn’t really distinguish between some godforsaken district of Moscow — the really run-down district of Moscow–or the suburbs.  We chose to film in Latvia, because we realized that we couldn’t have done it in Russia. Filming in Russia now would be impossible.