Since 1986, he has lived in Moscow where he continued his studies at the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts until 1990.

[2] Elena (2011), again premiered at Cannes, in the Un Certain Regard section,[3] receiving the festival's Jury Prize.

Leviathan (2014) was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or in the main competition section for its year at Cannes,[5] where Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin won the award for Best Screenplay for the film.

His most recent film, Loveless (2017), won the Jury Prize at Cannes in May 2017.

In 2023 it was announced that he is working on his next project titled Jupiter, about an oligarch, and is planning on shooting in spring 2024 in Europe.

[15][16][17] He subsequently developed polyneuropathy after he was put into an artificial coma in Germany, the result of which causing him to lose the ability to walk.

For a long time he could neither sit nor speak, and there were problems with the movement of his hands.

[15][16][17] In Russian dark comedy series The Last Minister Alexander Gorchilin plays an alternate reality version of Zvyagintsev[18] 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.