“The Magician in the Kremlin” in the cinema: Interview with director Assayas, why Putin is so interesting

OLivier Assayas, like most intellectuals, sits in front of a wall of books, which, however, appears pleasantly untidy. He lives in Paris and in what he describes as a remote corner of Tuscany. One of his neighbors there is the Italian-Swiss writer Giuliano da Empoli, who published the novel “The Magician in the Kremlin” at the beginning of 2022. He gave the book to Assayas to read. Assayas hesitated for a long time, but then he got to work together with the French writer Emmanuel Carrère. The two had known each other since they worked as film critics, and now they wrote the script together. “The Magician in the Kremlin” premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year. The director Assayas joined the interview via video from Paris.