Jude Law’s The Wizard of the Kremlin arrives as Olivier Assayas says the film became more relevant the longer it took to make. Speaking with Peter Gray ahead of the film’s national release, he said he wanted to make a film about politics while history was still unfolding, not a partisan argument built after the fact.
Peter Gray and Assayas
Assayas told Peter Gray that the project was never meant to be a partisan statement. “I wanted to make a film about politics instead,” he said, adding, “What interested me was making a film about politics in the middle of that chaos – not how politics functioned yesterday or the day before, but how they function today.”
He also said, “I think we’re living through one of those transformational moments right now.” That framing places The Wizard of the Kremlin inside the same political churn it depicts, with the film built around the rise of Vladimir Putin through the eyes of the strategist who helps engineer his public image.
Giuliano da Empoli’s novel
The film is adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s bestselling novel, which gives Assayas a source text already steeped in political machinery rather than character biography alone. His adaptation keeps the focus on how image, narrative, and access operate together, which is why the project lands differently now than it would have in a calmer political moment.
Assayas said the pressure came from the world around the film, not from a rewrite of the material itself. “Propaganda, fake news, the manipulation of information – those have become central to how politics operates today,” he said, making the case that the film’s subject is not just power but the tools used to protect it.
Demonlover and politics
Assayas also pointed back to Demonlover while discussing the fictional digital nightmare he imagined there, which signals how long he has been circling systems of control. In The Wizard of the Kremlin, that instinct is redirected toward a political order built on messaging and narrative management, not spectacle.
For readers coming to the film through Jude Law, the useful takeaway is simple: this is not being sold as a flag-waving political verdict. It is a movie about how politics works when information itself is part of the contest, and that makes its release feel closer to a live document than a sealed period piece.
The remaining question is the one Assayas leaves hanging: what specific events during production made the film sharpen into something more urgent. That uncertainty is part of the movie’s power, because it suggests the gap between real politics and political cinema kept narrowing while the film was still being made.
