Andrey Zvyagintsev is a Russian film director and screenwriter born on February 6, 1964 in Novosibirsk.
Initially poised to become an actor (he attended the prestigious Russian Academy of Theatre Arts in Moscow after graduating from drama school in his native Siberia), he discovered his vocation for directing when, during a bout of underemployment, he turned to directing episodes of some TV series.
He appears as somewhat of a Russian version of Nuri Bilge Ceylan. They share a common passion for the works of Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky.
Zvyagintsev makes cold, chilly, slow-burning movies, full of angry, despondent characters for whom events always turn for the worse. He is also an ardent critic of the current political and economic system in Russia.
He left Russia in 2022 for both health reasons and his opposition to the war in Ukraine, and resides in France since then.
Filmography:
- The Black Room (2000, TV series)
- The Return (2003)
- The Banishment (2007)
- New York, I Love You - "Apocrypha" (2009) note
- Experiment 5IVE - "Mystery" (2011)
- Elena (2011)
- Leviathan (2014)
- Loveless (2017)
- Jupiter (TBA)
Tropes applying to his works:
- Awful Wedded Life: Several of his films feature unhappy married couples.
- Crapsack World: Zvyagintsev does not think much of contemporary Russia, to say the least.
- Creator's Oddball: His next film, Jupiter, will be in English language, a first for him, likely due to him not being able to shoot in Russia anymore due to his opposition to the war in Ukraine.
- Downer Ending: The three films he made in The New '10s definitely don't end well.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The Return, which is a completely apolitical parable.
- From Bad to Worse: Nothing goes right for his characters in Elena, Leviathan and Loveless, and it only gets worse over time for them.
- Inspiration for the Work: His inspirations are to be found in the works of Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky.
- Leave the Camera Running: As his teachers did.
- One-Word Title: Played very straight with most of his films.
- Reality Has No Soundtrack: Averted. Bressoniac as he might be, he usually illustrates the events with eerie music.
- Referenced by...: In the Russian Black Comedy series The Last Minister, Alexander Gorchilin plays an Alternate Universe version of Zvyagintsev who's kidnapped by a secret government agency and forced to make a sequel to Leviathan as part of a psyop to bolster Russia's reputation as world's bleakest and scariest country.
- Troubled Production: The production of Zvyagintsev's next film, Jupiter (Working Title What Happens), has been plagued by several factors, including the director's health.
- The COVID-19 Pandemic prevented shooting in 2020, as with the majority of projects worldwide back then.
- A few days after receiving the Russian-made anti-COVID-19 Sputnik V vaccine in 2021, Zvyagintsev caught a severe form of COVID nonetheless, with a violent fever, and was put into an artificial coma in a hospital in Germany. Then he contracted sepsis as a result of a nosocomial infection resistant to antibiotics and subsequently developed polyneuropathy, the result of which causing him to lose the ability to walk and speak for several months, and his throat ligaments were injured. He spent the better part of 2022 recovering.
- Adding to this, in early 2022 his (Ukrainian-born but then-Russia based) producer Alexander Rodnyansky publicly announced that all of his Russian projects were put on hold or closed as a result of the mass scale Russian invasion of Ukraine (which Zvyagintsev also publicly opposes), although he later found new partnerships outside of Russia and Jupiter is on track to be filmed, eventually.
