Entertainment

Boris Volodarsky Spent Decades Studying Spies, Now He’s Making Movies About Them

Published

2 months ago

June 9, 2026

Most directors who make spy films learned the genre by watching other spy films. Boris Volodarsky learned it by spending decades studying how intelligence operations actually work, writing books like The KGB’s Poison Factory and The Murder of Alexander Litvinenko, and consulting for the BBC and Hollywood along the way. So when he makes a thriller, the question isn’t whether he can fake authenticity. It’s what happens when someone who knows the real thing decides to dramatize it.

His new film, The Train, opens in Germany and Austria this September. It follows a luxury journey aboard the Majestic Imperator from Vienna to Prague, where three investor groups, a retiring SAS officer, and a lethal Russian agent all end up locked in the same gilded space as a sale turns into something far more dangerous. Before getting into what’s on screen, it’s worth hearing from Volodarsky himself about how a historian of espionage ended up behind the camera, why he cast a Romanian actress as a Russian operative, and what he wants audiences to take away.

You are a well-known intelligence historian and author of several important books on the history of espionage. How and why did you become a filmmaker?

I was born and raised in a theatrical family; my father was a theatre director. My parents did not want me to pursue a professional career in theatre or cinema so I became an intelligence historian. Later, I was invited to give interviews or serve as a consultant for several documentaries, mainly in London, where I lived, but also in Norway and Spain. My first role as chief consultant was in 2006, for a BBC Panorama investigation titled How to Poison a Spy about the Litvinenko case, which became a worldwide sensation and remained in the public eye for the next ten years. Michael Mann, a famous Hollywood director, also invited me to consult on his feature film about Litvinenko. We worked together for several months, but, unfortunately, the project was not realised. My most recent screen involvement was for a six-part documentary series Once Upon a Time in Londongrad (2022), directed by Jed Rothstein. Two years later, I was invited to direct two documentaries for Westside Studios in Vienna. And now comes The Train.

Does your academic work help or interfere with your work on films?

It goes without saying that what I know as an intelligence historian, including my research skills, all of that greatly helps when working on a script, when working with actors on their characters, with costume designers, and even on what filmmakers call “blocking”, that is, the precise staging and choreography of actors’ movements in relation to the camera, lighting, and set layout.

Then another question: why did you choose fiction to talk about this world?

Well, first of all, I did start with documentaries, not fiction. And then answering the question ‘why films?’, I would say that I moved into cinema because cinema can show what books cannot. Although my latest film, The Train, is indeed fiction, it is based on real facts and depicts situations that could very well happen, or maybe even happened, but remain unknown to the public, as everything else that relates to the so-called secret world. And I can assure you that this secret world really exists and is quietly present much closer to us than most people realise. This is not fiction.

The Train is your first full-length feature film, but you have been involved in several films before, both as director and historical consultant. Is that correct?

Yes, as mentioned, in 2024, I was invited to direct a documentary Spy Capital: Vienna and then Spy Capital-2: Name of the Game, both now available on Amazon Prime Video. The Train is my third film in two years.

How would you describe what your film is ultimately saying?

I believe the most important thing was to remind everybody – and this is often forgotten, ignored, or simply unknown – that the secret world exists alongside the overt or public world. As my editor puts it, there is a theatre of influence in which power is exercised invisibly, behind the official reality. Our film clearly demonstrates this, whether in the luxury of a 5-star property in Malta, in a posh villa, in the famous Langham Hotel in London, or even during a leisure journey on the Imperial Majestic train through Central Europe, with 200 guests eating, drinking, and enjoying exclusive shows. This shadow world never truly sleeps. In the film, we show that as rival interests linked to China, Russia, and Great Britain quietly converge (and as a historian, I can tell you that it was exactly so two hundred years ago and would probably continue in the foreseeable future), what begins as a display of wealth and pleasure gradually becomes a tightly controlled game of deception and survival.

The principal female character of the film is a Russian secret agent — an operative of the Russian military intelligence service, the infamous GRU. For this role, you chose a Romanian actress. Why not Russian?

I was considering two Russian female performers for the role: one professional actress and one model. There were other Russian and Ukrainian candidates, too, currently living in Europe. The model, who resides in Poland, was even invited to Vienna for a casting. She dropped out at once. Also, in the current political climate surrounding Russia’s war against Ukraine, some Russian actresses were understandably hesitant about travelling abroad to play a Russian intelligence operative. Finally, our casting director showed a photo of Madalina Bellariu Ion, a famous Romanian actress, and the decision was made at once. There are several episodes in the film where I am genuinely impressed by her performance.

What distinguishes the film’s main protagonist from the familiar heroes of the spy thriller genre?

This is a difficult question because it clearly refers to iconic protagonists like Bond, Bourne, or John McClane. In the film, Dennis DeWall plays a retiring SAS Major Alex Stirling. The British Special Air Service (22 SAS) barracks in Credenhill, Herefordshire, are known as Stirling Lines, named in honour of the Service’s founder, Lieutenant Colonel Sir David Stirling. Dennis is playing his grandson. His hero’s life philosophy coincides with that of his brave ancestor: Who Dares Wins, which is the official motto of this legendary regiment, widely regarded as one of the finest special forces regiments in the world. These people are very different from the familiar screen archetypes, and I do not remember good examples of a SAS officer as the main protagonist in popular movies. In The Train, we tried to show operational realism as well as the human and professional qualities of an SAS operative, whose names, as Alex says, are never mentioned. I hope we succeeded.

Which moments in the film do you think will be most interesting or unexpected for the audience?

I think audiences will be particularly interested in the contrast between the elegance of the train and the hidden tensions unfolding beneath the surface. What begins as a luxurious journey gradually turns into something far darker and more dangerous. There are also several moments involving the main female character that viewers will probably not expect.

What comes through in talking to Volodarsky is how seriously he takes the gap between what the public sees and what actually happens. He’s not selling spectacle. He’s arguing that the world he spent his career documenting is real, ongoing, and closer than most people would like to think. That conviction is what separates The Train from the usual genre exercise. The film leans on practical fight work choreographed by Ali Kabalan, with Dennis DeWall doing his own high-risk stunts on moving trains, and it earns its tension through specificity rather than gloss. When the man directing has written extensively about real assassinations, the violence on screen carries a different weight.

That same attention shows up in the smaller details, the things filling the tables while the guests eat, drink, and pretend not to watch each other. One of them is worth a closer look. The lager the characters keep reaching for is ROLEY’S Super Natural Lager, a sponsor of the film and a natural fit for a story set among people who want the good life without the hangover that comes with it. It’s a British beer built around a brewing process the company calls SmartBrew, which trims the calories and carbs while keeping the flavour where it should be. The numbers do the talking: 89 calories a can, 4.4% ABV, 0.1g of sugar, and B vitamins brewed in. Founder Stewart Rowley, a former professional rugby player, built it because he wanted a beer he could enjoy without the trade-offs, and it went on to take Gold at the World Beer Awards 2025 along with Best International Lager in the UK. On a train full of people who’ve come to be seen with a glass in hand, it belongs there.

That’s the trick of the whole film, really. The polish is real, the glamour is real, and so is everything moving underneath it. The Train opens in Germany and Austria on September 10, 2026, followed by a London premiere and a wider international release. What runs through everything Volodarsky says is the same idea that runs through the film: that the secret world isn’t a screenwriter’s invention but something operating quietly alongside the one the rest of us live in. Come September, audiences get to step into it for themselves.

Related Topics:culture Entertainment Featured news trending

Up Next

When Lord Conrad Becomes the Hero of His Own AI-Generated Universe

Don't Miss

Hannah Rae Lee Bets on Buckshot Records for Her Next Chapter

Popular Hustle Staff

This article contains branded content provided by a third party. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the content creator or sponsor and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or editorial stance of Popular Hustle.

Entertainment

Project Rod Williams Wants You to Step Into Its Cyborg World

Published

8 hours ago

July 28, 2026

Popular Hustle Staff

Project Rod Williams doesn’t just want you to hear their songs, they want you inside the world built around them. Roderick Williams, the songwriter and producer behind the project, storyboards a “human-like cyborg world” that every one of their music videos lives inside, a cinematic sci-fi setting you step into rather than just watch. And the way it’s built goes to the heart of an argument at the center of the project: that the AI tools now folded into the work are no different in principle from the synthesizers that let ’80s acts skip hiring a full band or orchestra.

Project Rod Williams runs out of a home studio in the Washington D.C. metro area, and it started there as an electro-pop studio ensemble. The setup was collective from the jump: a place to write from personal experience and pull in different vocalists to actually sing it. The project has kept at it through a long run of releases going back to their debut album, Fire.

The catalog since then tells you of a project figuring out its signature and then leaning into it. Early tracks like “Let’s Get Out,” featuring Ben Dial, and the 2021 album Run Away paired electronic dance-pop with lyrics reaching for social themes. Spin Me landed in 2020, the Fantasy maxi-single in 2022, and more recent work with vocalist Tim Condor on “Like a Fool” in 2024 and “Well Runs Dry” in 2025 pushed harder into emotional delivery and detailed sound design. Three-part harmony, big grooves, glossy electronic textures. That’s the through line.

Two eras shape how Project Rod Williams thinks about making music with machines. There’s the ’80s synth-pop crowd, Depeche Mode, The Human League, Erasure, and there’s the ’70s disco architects Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer. What the project takes from all of them is the same lesson. They didn’t wait around for a bigger budget. Instead of booking a live band or orchestra they reached for electronic keyboards and proved an instrument doesn’t have to be acoustic to make something real.

“To me AI is simply a modern synthesizer,” Williams says. He lines it up next to the way hip-hop turned sampling into a craft, treating each of these tools as one more thing on the palette. The point is that originality has never happened in a vacuum anyway. Musicians soak up whatever they grew up on, writers reach for a thesaurus, and the work still comes out belonging to whoever made it. Using AI is the same move those heroes made: taking a lifetime of influences and grabbing the best available tool to get the vision out.

That thinking is exactly what powers the cyborg world. Project Rod Williams doesn’t just write the songs, they design the whole setting the songs play out in, video by video. The goal is immersion, getting a first-time listener to feel like they’ve walked into a cinematic sci-fi setting instead of just hitting play. The generative tools feed straight into that, building out the futuristic universe around the music without the budget that kind of world-building would normally demand.

Then there’s the pivot the project has been building toward. After years rooted in synth-pop, Project Rod Williams is moving into what they call the Rock/Dance Evolution, rock’s rawer push welded to a dance rhythm. The shift spreads across a trilogy. The first one, Altered Impact, dropped January 12, 2026, ten tracks that rework nine of their earlier songs alongside one brand-new cut, “No One Can Love You (Baby Like I Do).” Two more are coming to finish the arc: Intense in early 2027 and Quiver later that year.

For now the work is finishing the visual rollout. Seven of the album’s ten videos are already up on the project’s YouTube, and the last three arrive on a set schedule: “Dangerous Lover” on August 1st, “Only In My Dreams (Do You Love Me)” on August 21st, and “Now” on September 14th. I got an early look at all three, and they hold up next to what’s already out, each one its own story stitched together by that cyberpunk aesthetic running through everything.

What Project Rod Williams wants people to actually take from the music has less to do with the tech. The songs keep circling romance, psychology, and the business of moving on, turning heartbreak into something that builds you up rather than just knocking you down. The project is chasing a feeling of empowerment, the kind that comes with getting lost in a world built down to the detail.

That world is the whole point. The genre is shifting and the tools keep growing, but the tools were never the story, the project is what makes them mean something. So step into the cyborg world Project Rod Williams has dreamed up. Start with their Spotify, follow it frame by frame on YouTube, and keep up with everything at projectrodwilliams.com.

Entertainment

Lord Conrad Builds a House Anthem Around Dreaming Big on ‘Be Yours’

Published

4 weeks ago

July 2, 2026

Popular Hustle Staff

Lord Conrad wants you to picture the version of your life where everything went right. That’s the idea behind “Be Yours,” the progressive house single the Italian producer released on June 25th. The track runs 3:19, but the feeling it’s chasing sticks around longer than that.

Born Corrado Garibaldi in Milan, Lord Conrad has spent years pushing European EDM into a US market that leans heavily toward hip-hop. He’s one of the few doing it with any real traction. His video for “One More Day” landed on the Seven Hip-Hop channel, which has more than 1.9 million subscribers, and “Deep Love” got picked up by Chili World, sitting north of 1.2 million. He’s also built a following elsewhere, with over 400k on Instagram and a shuffle-dance hit in “Only You” that’s racked up more than 860k views on its official video. “Be Yours” fits that pattern while reaching for something bigger.

The song itself leans on a soulful hook and a lead synth riff you’ll recognize after one listen. Female vocals wash over a wall of synths, and the arrangement splits the difference between full-throttle rave energy and something lighter and more ethereal. It’s built for a festival crowd but doesn’t beat you over the head. That balance is what keeps it from feeling like every other floor-filler chasing summer playlist placement.

Then there’s the video, which runs 5:16 and plays more like a short film than a promo clip. Lord Conrad performs a futuristic DJ set surrounded by supercars, massive crowds, and a wash of next-gen visuals. At one point the Nasdaq spikes to a million, a wink at his other life as a trader and investor.

What holds the whole thing together is the theme Lord Conrad calls “The Dream of Tomorrow.” The pitch is simple. Bet on your own ambition, believe the vision, and act like the future is already yours. Whether that lands as inspiring or a little grandiose probably depends on your tolerance for maximalism, but he commits to it fully, and the commitment is half the appeal.

You can dig into “Be Yours” at Lord Conrad’s website or stream the single here, and follow along on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Spotify. For anyone who likes their house music built around dreaming a size too big, that’s the point.

Entertainment

Lofi Bug Records Is Building A Massive Free Sample Library So Producers Stop Paying To Make Beats

Published

4 weeks ago

June 29, 2026

Popular Hustle Staff

There’s a quiet kind of gatekeeping in music production that nobody talks about much. It’s not who you know or which label signs you. It’s the cost of the raw materials. Loops, drum kits, one-shots, the building blocks of a beat, all of it adds up fast, and for someone making music on a laptop at 2am, those price tags can be the difference between finishing a track and giving up on it. Lofi Bug Records, an independent lo-fi label, is trying to knock that barrier down entirely.

The label is currently putting together a huge sample library that anyone can use for free. Loops, drums and sounds, all royalty free, all available at no cost. Lofi Bug describes the goal plainly: make it one of the biggest free packs out there so producers don’t have to worry about clearing samples or paying for the sounds they’re working with. The pack is still growing, with more being added, but the intent is already clear. The label wants to take the financial guesswork out of starting.

That mission tracks with how Lofi Bug itself came together. It started the way a lot of bedroom projects do, with one person messing around on a laptop late at night, unable to sleep. The first beat wasn’t even good, but it felt good to make, and that feeling turned into a habit. The habit turned into a label. Lofi Bug officially launched in 2024 and grew significantly this year, but the scrappy, do-it-with-what-you-have spirit never went anywhere. If anything, the free sample library is that spirit scaled up.

What makes the library more than a giveaway is the thinking behind it. Lofi Bug describes itself as artist focused and artist run, a place where each artist fully chooses what they make and how they make it. The label frames itself as a community for like-minded people who love lo-fi, and it’s direct about wanting newcomers to feel welcome. The message it keeps coming back to is that you don’t need expensive gear or a big budget to make something good. Start with what you’ve got, keep it fun, and don’t overthink it. A free pack of usable, clearance-free sounds is a pretty literal way to back that up.

For the uninitiated, lo-fi is more a mood than a strict genre. Warm tape hiss, dusty drums, mellow keys, the kind of sound built for studying, relaxing, or those late nights when your brain won’t shut off. Lofi Bug leans into that completely, calling its music warm and a little nostalgic, the sort of thing you put on in the background rather than something loud or demanding your attention. The whole point, as the label puts it, is to help someone chill out and feel a little calmer, whether they’re focusing on work or just getting through a rough night.

The roster reflects that low-key, global spirit. Four artists currently anchor the catalog: Ma Malte from Sweden, Mai Aya from the United States, Ukaleb from Canada, and Mao Mao Cat from Korea. They make calm, late-night beats, and the label handles the parts most independent producers dread. Distribution to every major platform, marketing built around growing real listeners, and rights protection. Lofi Bug has delivered more than 100 releases and reaches over 150 stores and platforms worldwide, including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Deezer and Tidal.

The piece that matters most to artists, though, is ownership. With Lofi Bug, you keep all of your rights. You own your masters and your publishing, and the copyright stays yours. The label takes a small cut of royalties for the distribution, marketing and rights work it does, with the rest going to the artist. There’s no fine print designed to take your music away from you, which is a sentence you don’t often get to write about a record label.

The submission process is refreshingly human. Artists send a demo through the contact form, and according to the label, every single one gets listened to personally. No algorithms deciding your fate, just people who actually love the sound. From there, Lofi Bug handles mastering, artwork and distribution, then moves into playlisting and promotion so the artist can get back to making the next track. The label also publishes a guide breaking down how to distribute lo-fi music step by step, covering everything from prepping clean metadata to the difference between going the DIY aggregator route and releasing through a label.

All of which makes the free sample library feel less like a marketing stunt and more like the natural extension of how Lofi Bug already operates. Lo-fi has always been about accessibility, about anyone with a laptop and an idea being able to contribute. A massive pack of sounds, handed out with no strings attached, might be the most honest version of that idea anyone’s tried.

You can find Lofi Bug at lofibug.com or follow the label on Instagram.