Putin's hybrid human/artificial approach is the film’s unique selling point. Photo / @patryk_vega_official
Polish director Patryk Vega has created a digital hybrid of the Russian President for his new film — how does it stack up?
How do you get Vladimir Putin to star in his own biopic? If you’re Polish director Patryk Vega, the answer is (relatively) simple: you hire Polish actor Slawomir Sobala, ask him to spend two years studying “Putin’s body language, his gait, and his way of entering a room”, and then use artificial intelligence to superimpose Putin’s face on to Sobala’s. The result is simply called Putin.
“The audience needed to see the real Putin on screen,” Vega has said. “They see him every day in the media. Even the best actor with great makeup wouldn’t convincingly portray a figure everyone in the world knows so well. Inviting Putin to the studio for 20,000 shots wasn’t an option, and achieving the highest resolution detail is impossible without having a physical human model to photograph in a studio. Without this real-world reference, AI simply cannot replicate the level of precision we’ve accomplished.”
Nor, Vega has said, can AI alone convincingly replicate intricate movements or convey human emotions as yet.
This hybrid human/artificial approach is the film’s USP. Although the promotional material invites the viewer to “enter the mind of the most dangerous man on earth”, Putin is unlikely to be particularly nuanced.
Vega’s movies so far, such as the gangster film Pitbull or serial killer flick The Plagues of Breslau, have been notable more for their gory violence and vulgar style than for deep insights into political structures or the human condition.
And the trailer for Putin suggests a fairly cliched approach to the material.
A young Vladimir, bullied by other children, decides that “it’s better to die standing than live on your knees” and fights back — cut to an adult Vladimir performing a judo throw. He proceeds to exhort Boris Yeltsin, his predecessor as president, to “hand your power over to me. Only I can save you” and, in one scene, appears to be part of a hunting party whose “prey” is a dozen women dressed as Playboy bunnies.
It’s certainly not a flattering portrait of the Russian President, and that’s even before we get to the scene where a terminally ill Putin is lying shaking in hospital in a soiled adult nappy.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Vega has said the movie has attracted the attention of Putin’s spies. “I had a really funny experience with Russian intelligence,” he said at the Cannes Film Festival last May.
“They took from LinkedIn whole numbers of mobile phones for my crew and started messaging these people, saying things like, ‘I am an assistant to a congressman from South Dakota, I hear you made this film. My boss would like to pay US$100,000 [$177,480] for a screening of this movie, and also for a script’.”
Sobala has said he was among those contacted and offered US$50,000 for a script, but turned them down. “The film’s message and purpose were far too important to compromise,” he said.
Vega, assuming the Russian intelligence operatives were trying to discover the negative ways in which the movie intended to portray Putin, decided to have some fun with them.
“I started a conversation with them posing as a costume designer. I started negotiating a price, it was US$200,000, I told them they need to send me the first transfer, US$10,000 just for proof. They agreed. When they asked where to send the transfer, he gave them the details of Agencja Wywiadu, the Polish version of MI6. The messages immediately stopped.”
Such defiance of the Kremlin is not without its risks: Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny are testament to that. But Vega, who cut his teeth as a young documentary maker riding with local homicide squads in Poland, says he’s not afraid of angering Putin.
And while “lots of distributors and companies felt fear — one public relations company in the US said they were afraid that Putin would hit their building by rocket”, Vega has said distribution rights for the US$14 million film have now been sold in more than 50 countries.
“Whether speaking with distributors in countries like India and Brazil, who are electrified by the prospect of creating a currency to counter the dollar, or in South Korea, which finds the film especially poignant due to its tensions with North Korea, the response is the same. Even in Africa, people connect deeply with the film amid fears of famine due to grain embargoes. Putin’s narrative is a global one.”
The poster’s tagline “Absolute power is never enough” deliberately echoes the historian Lord Acton’s famous 1887 observation that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
For Vega, Putin’s pursuit of power must be met with a firm hand.
“Putin only understands the language of strength. Psychology teaches us that backing down in front of any aggressor only fuels their aggression. Therefore, the West must stop deceiving itself into thinking that appeasement towards Putin can yield any real benefits. [Donald] Trump is the right politician to confront Putin, because his own oversized ego won’t let him appear weak. Putin behaves entirely differently when dealing with leaders like [Turkey’s Recep Tayyip] Erdogan or [Israel’s Benjamin] Netanyahu.”
In the end, Putin may well prove less controversial for what it says than for how it says it.
The use of artificial intelligence was a key issue behind the actors’ and writers’ strikes of 2023 and were only resolved when unions and studios agreed on protections against its use.
Even so, AI is becoming increasingly common across the industry, whether overtly or behind closed doors.
“There are tons of people who are using AI, but they can’t admit it publicly because you still need artists for a lot of work and they’re going to turn against you,” David Stripinis, a visual effects industry veteran, has said. “Right now, it’s a PR problem more than a tech problem.”
Where some perceive threats, however, others see opportunity. “AI isn’t going to take over creation,” head of YouTube France Justine Ryst has countered. “It’s going to simplify the complex and make possible the impossible. We need to want to be bold and disruptive, but also responsible.”
Similarly, Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos has said that AI “is going to generate a great set of creator tools, a great way for creators to tell better stories”, adding that “there’s a better business and a bigger business in making content 10% better than it is making it 50% cheaper”.
Vega believes his own AI technology, developed during the making of Putin, will help other film-makers.
“Film and TV productions will eventually employ only leading and perhaps supporting actors, while the entire world of background and minor characters will be created digitally,” he has said.
But he has struck an overall optimistic note for those who fear imminent takeover by the machines: “AI was merely a tool we used for computing power, nothing more. Ultimately, the emotional depth and realism that define this character were crafted by people, not by AI, and the true artistry comes from human experience, not artificial intelligence.”
Putin will be out internationally on January 10. A confirmed New Zealand release date is not known.
The Kiwi actor has been part of the Star Wars universe for more than 20 years.