When hit with U.S. sanctions, Vladislav Surkov, a former advisor to Russian president Vladimir Putin, said, “The only things that interest me in the U.S. are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don’t need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing.”
Surkov is the inspiration for Paul Dano’s character Vadim Baranov in the film The Wizard of the Kremlin. Baranov is a swaggering consigliere to Putin, directing the president on how to win hearts and minds with a blitzkrieg of propaganda packaged in an accessible and blustering MTV-style format. Baranov comes from the underground art world and ascends to producing cheap and insidious art in service of authoritarianism. As an artist himself, Dano has something to say about that.
“I think this is not a film just about Russia,” Dano told The Knockturnal. “It’s about modern politics and modern power and the modern tactics used to achieve power and influence.”
He continued,“[Baranov is] an incredibly complex individual, somebody who could be working within politics and treating the world like a stage, which is really an unkind thing to do, but then be an admirer of art. Be writing stuff on the side. There’s a perverse sense of artistry at work there.”
Courtesy of Carole Bethuel
While Dano’s character is based on Surkov, it’s not entirely a facsimile. The backstory, for one, is completely different. “I could not totally base [my performance] on Surkov. I took what I could from him,” he said. One thing Dano did not take from him, however, was his accent.
“I don’t think it’s great when people do Russian accents,” he said. “The country is too big to get specific with the accents.” Dano’s co-stars come from all over. Jude Law, who plays Putin, is British. Alicia Vikander, who plays Baranov’s muse, is Swedish. Neither, along with Dano and most of the rest of the cast, put on a Russian accent.
(Courtesy of Carole Bethuel)
Dano notes that the film could not shoot in Russia due to political circumstances. Instead, filming went down in Riga, Latvia. The story spans a thirty year period, showing how the country shifted from the end of the Soviet Union into the lengthy Putin administration. He said, “It was really wild to create a thirty year journey within Riga for Russia.”
The Wizard of the Kremlin premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is currently playing in theaters.
