Near the end of their talk at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last Tuesday night, host Paul Holdengräber leaned back in his chair and turned to Costa-Gavras. “One could say you’re quite interested in unhappy endings.” Gavras, the famed French-Greek filmmaker known for political thrillers like Z and Missing, revealed his distaste of the Hollywood tradition. “The little guy always wins,” Costa-Gavras said. “You go home feeling well and go to sleep feeling well. But that’s not real life.”
The talk was part of the Onassis Cultural Center’s Profiles series. Gavras’ new film, Capital, which opens at the end of the month in New York, takes Gavras’ hatred of political oppression into the financial realm. The movie explores the evils of capitalism, via a bank executive who lands in the CEO chair and immediately starts courting stockholders, firing underlings, and fucking up his family. Money, he explains to his distraught wife, makes people respect you. Unlike Wall Street, the little guys here not only don’t win, they get crushed. To research the film, Costa-Gavras poured over the financial pages, talked to bankers, and dove deep into economic history. One banker told him, “Democracy is a placebo. We belong not to the people, but to the most important stockholders. Because if we don’t do what they want us to do, they change us.” Fitting, then, that the first movie he ever remembered watching was Erich von Stroheim’s Greed.
Gavras has spent his life using film as a tool to expose political injustice. But now, at 80, he wants to make a musical, though he doesn’t know what about. (“If I knew,” he said, “I would have made it already.”) At one point in the conversation, Holdengräber asked Gavras, given his oeuvre, if he saw himself as a political filmmaker. “I don’t. I never accept the idea of ‘political film’. I think that all movies are political. I never say to myself, Ok, now I will make a political movie. That’s ridiculous. I say, this story interests me.”
Lane Koivu
