THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW CONSTANTIN COSTA-GAVRAS
Dreifus, Claudia
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW Constantin Costa-Gavras Politics at the Box Office BY CLAUDIA DREIFUS In the world of international cinema, there's absolutely no one like Constantin Costa-Gavras. At...
...Costa-Gavras: What happened essentially was that the American Embassy could know, immediately, what happened to Charles Horman, and tell the father, immediately, "Look, your son's dead...
...Some of the extreme right-wing people that you see in my film who look very ugly can also be good people— and then, besides that, is the dark side of them...
...But I felt it was a story that had to be told...
...Sign a petition...
...Costa-Gavras: No, we couldn't...
...Costa-Gavras: You know, I don't like the word "prophetic...
...It's just a patchwork of characters...
...At fifty-four, he's the world's number one political-commercial filmmaker...
...What was interesting in Charles Horman's disappearance was that it indicates a government's technique for oppression...
...It's political, and there's no main character in the movie...
...Q: In the opening of Betrayed, you have a scene where a disk-jockey, an Alan Berg type, gets a phone call from a listener who says, "The Holocaust never happened...
...It wasn't just an injustice...
...They share that insane idea that society is one way, and this is all it can be...
...She tries to survive: using everything...
...Debra is a person who wants to be out front...
...There were some actors who started working with me on some scenes, and then the Party asked them not to participate, and they quit...
...I didn't want to make a movie with just "good guys" and "bad guys," with people being really bad, and so forth...
...It was a disturbing experience...
...This is something I learned as I researched this film, which I did very thoroughly...
...You've never had so active a woman in any of your previous films...
...Embassy in Chile hid the facts about Charles Horman's death because of something to do with Henry Kissinger's elevation, at that time, to the office of Secretary of State...
...There were some problems from the State Department...
...I have been trying for several years now to find the story to make a movie about apartheid...
...He has an extraordinary curiosity about everything foreign he encounters in the United States, and so many things are...
...Costa-Gavras: Yes...
...Costa-Gavras: I put it in because it's one of the things that comes back each year here and everywhere...
...They even showed me some places where they hide the guns, you know, they have a special safe for the guns...
...If you're the director and you're a man, it is accepted that you must be macho—the Cowboy, again...
...Q: Why did you pick Debra Winger as your alter ego...
...I don't know what to make of it, what definitive conclusions to draw from my experience...
...The pains and problems of the American heartland are shown with all their strong contradictions...
...Constantin Costa-Gavrass I cannot say this is true about me...
...Costa-Gavras: I took a lot of trips to the Middle West to meet people, to see farmers, to see the FBI people, the FBI offices...
...To research Betrayed, I visited farms and other places in the United States...
...Costa-Gavras: Because the U.S...
...It's about a confused woman lawyer working in Israel...
...Costa-Gavras: I think for this generation, she's probably the best actress...
...But it would be completely dishonest to say something like this...
...I think even if their deeds were really awful and have to be condemned, they are human beings somehow...
...Real things have happened to these farmers: They've lost their land, their community, their assumed way of life...
...But the FBI people in Chicago gave me all the information I needed...
...Q: Z was an enormously successful film, commercially...
...The movie touched a very sensitive area, and they didn't like those things said...
...J: Please say more...
...I wasn't going to reshoot the film...
...The Americans were there, and the coup didn't take place without their help...
...I felt that the FBI's attitude towards me was part of your democratic way of living...
...Costa-Gavras: First, because they carry the philosophy and ideology of the people who are making them...
...Costa-Gavras: Yeah...
...You have Debra Winger infiltrate those paramilitary groups, witness killings, rob a bank, kill a man...
...The best thing a movie can do is ask questions, and of course to ask the right questions...
...Q: I guess that shows the power of the movies, as opposed to books...
...Costa-Gavras: Because America is a unique place, where the passions are so clear-cut...
...First of all, not all my movies are commercial...
...The character in the movie, she's like that also...
...I was always investigating stories and scripts, but I never found anything that was close to my vision of things...
...I have set her up so that the audience hopefully identifies with her...
...So the movie is the story of the father, and I had to stay close to the character...
...That is racism, I believe...
...Q: After filming State of Siege in Chile, you must have felt terribly jinxed...
...We protect American lives, unless you're an American with different ideas...
...It was very peculiar...
...But this is also the FBI that finds the killers of Alan Berg [the Denver radio personality who was shot to death in 1984] and tries to stop them and tries to protect society...
...Nobody cares about it...
...and seems even good-natured when one cites criticism of some of his less successful products...
...Q: And yet, that movie became a symbol of resistance to the regime of the colonels...
...so I have to repeat that...
...I was surprised to see that in France, America, Canada, Argentina, Mexico—people had the same reactions at the same moments in the film...
...Q: Well, it is interesting that in Betrayed, you make a woman your protagonist, and she's an active protagonist...
...Palestinians and Israelis each didn't like the movie, I've been told...
...It was a whole movement...
...I didn't have money to reshoot the film...
...Q: When you start on a film, do you consciously set out to tell a political story...
...It creates an extraordinary kind of anguish...
...In Europe now, we have things like the Le Pen movement in France...
...I believe you've said that news of Horman's murder by the Chilean military was suppressed because it would have been embarrassing to Kissinger that an American had been killed that way...
...That means that whatever happens with the Palestinian problem, it will come back again and again, until the day of its solution, until an acceptable solution will be found...
...I don't have proof...
...Thousands of people disappeared all over Latin America...
...I suppose they knew who I was...
...Completely...
...Costa-Gavras: French Cosmopolitan...
...The problem with Hanna K. is that there are too many symbols...
...Q: It must have been moving, too, for you to return to Greece after the fall of the cclonels and see Z screened at an Athens theater...
...We talk for two hours, easily...
...Most of the American themes are sexist: a man can do everything by himself...
...America is the leading country in the Western world and probably the whole world...
...Q: How is this "American...
...And now, with "Betrayed" (to be released by United Artists in the United States this September), Costa-Gavras has turned his cameras for the first time to a North American subject: the growth of right-wing paramilitary organizations among farmers in the American Middle West...
...Ray has produced several of Costa-Gavras's pictures—though this one was put together by Irwin Winkler, who gave the world the first "Rocky...
...Costa-Gavras: Oh, yeah...
...Was it hard to work with a woman who challenged your power...
...It would be stupid to say that...
...Q: Are your films motivated by the feeling: "I must tell this story...
...It was quite moving...
...Second, because a movie is a dialogue, an exchange, a relationship with the audience...
...Yes this is the same FBI I read about that was infiltrating groups peacefully opposing U.S...
...And it's a problem...
...Costa-Gavras: Yes, and it became a kind of peculiar symbol for other cultures, too...
...I made my decision to make the film immediately after the coup, the day after...
...the skinheads, the pro-Nazi movements, and so forth...
...Government always teaches us that "we protect American lives...
...Everything, every character, is symbolic in a certain way...
...Q: Your last film with a female protagonist, Hanna K., many say is your most flawed film...
...He was staying at the Algonquin, in a rather unpretentious room, giving interviews, attending concerts, taking telephone calls from Gloria Steinem and Debra Winger—two close friends...
...It's the Cowboy Myth...
...Costa-Gavras: Oh, yes...
...Everyone thought it was against them...
...One senses that one can ask him anything...
...You know, I knew Jean Seberg well [the late Iowa-born actress who became a victim of the Cointelpro program of the 1960s...
...I decided all these things were secondary, and that I should do something with my profession, something I know about: make a movie...
...Costa-Gavras came to New York City to show "Betrayed" to a select group of critics one recent afternoon...
...It would be difficult to find the kind of theme that would work out...
...In every story, we try to find a way of making a movie...
...They made a statement...
...But they never made a suit against the book...
...When you see the movie, you see some actors in one role and then, in the next scene, it changes completely...
...Costa-Gavras: It was great...
...Costa-Gavras: Why do you say it's flawed...
...The movie had the same success all over...
...Freedom of speech is the first important thing to a democracy...
...Costa-Gavras: People were waiting with Hanna K. for a kind of clear-cut position, for this side or the other side...
...There you had made a film about a coup in a Latin American country, and then the film came true...
...The beginning of racism is not actions against communities or religions, it is against democracy also...
...To show this was essential to the movie, I think...
...What I liked best about Debra is that she looks like a little girl disguised as a tiger—just able to survive...
...In making a movie about the American heartland, you were on such completely foreign turf...
...It's the worst philosophy one can learn...
...And they can be bad guys...
...It's a government method of torture...
...But I do think in showing some of the ambiguities of the Middle East, you were prophetic about the current crisis...
...Costa-Gavras: Yes...
...Costa-Gavras: Oh, this is what the father claims, very openly...
...Nobody has ever done a film on that subject before...
...A way of being racist...
...Government attempt to suppress Missing, your film about the overthrow of the Allende regime...
...Costa-Gavras: That's right...
...I thought, "Who needs to see another movie about a neurotic woman, sort of involved with three men, who doesn't know what she wants...
...Or in the case of Benjamin Linder, the American citizen killed by the contras in Nicaragua in the spring of 1987...
...But I really am convinced that during the time of the coup the military was under American influence...
...We see it everywhere: the myth of the individual man, that one man can be made to do everything, to survive by himself, to make it without help...
...Q: Are the roots of Missing in State of Siege, the film you made about torture and kidnapping in Uruguay...
...The audience must find the answers—if it can...
...Costa-Gavras makes hugely popular movies, but he makes them on subjects usually investigated only by obscure documentary cineastes: torture in Latin America ("State of Siege"), the overthrow of the Allende regime in Chile ("Missing"), the Palestinian-Israeli conflict ("Hanna K."), the destruction of democracy in Greece during the 1960s ("Z"), Stalinism in Eastern Europe ("The Confession...
...Q: You have so many places in your life that could be where you define your identity...
...He says at the end, "I'll be back...
...In the same person, you can go from the very light to the very dark...
...Nobody touched that subject...
...Do you mean: "Hey, we conquered the forests, the frontiers, the Indians, we guys don't need anyone, we are all 'Rambo...
...Costa-Gavras: Their openness is American...
...To me, a movie cannot be prophetic...
...Q: Tell us about your research methods for Betrayed...
...So this is a subject that is important to talk about: this growth of right-wing racist movements...
...That leads nowhere...
...Costa-Gavras: No, more The Confession, which is about Eastern Europe...
...Producers told me, "Who would be interested in some military thing, in a movie about a guy who was assassinated in Greece...
...Try to see a minister...
...Q: To change the subject to one of your most successful films, didn't the U.S...
...After all these years, after making films about Greece and Latin America, why an American story...
...Q: What do the right-wing assassins in Betrayed have in common with the assassins in Z? Costa-Gavras: That's a good question...
...We were sued by some of the people indirectly portrayed in the movie: the Ambassador and other officials...
...Costa-Gavras: Yes...
...Q: Is that your favorite...
...Betrayed" is a hugely interesting movie: America, as seen through the eyes of a simultaneously admiring and critical foreigner...
...But with this one, one cannot read the symbols, cannot find a code...
...You don't know why...
...Q: So you were impressed with the FBI people...
...And I won't say the Ambassador said to the Chileans, "Go ahead and kill him," because there is not any proof...
...Did you use troops from the Chilean army for extras during the siege scenes...
...Costa-Gavras has a special talent for taking a political theme and translating it into popular terms...
...It's the right question in a certain way...
...And I think the movie is stronger because we identify with someone who's perceived as being very tragic and, at the same time, strong...
...She was a very close friend of mine, and we all know what they did to her...
...If I had it, I would say it...
...Q: Yes, but you're the director...
...Why should she be in the back...
...That's the theme of Mm-ing...
...This film was very American, but this idea is all over...
...Q: Your latest piece of cinematic provocation is set in North America, in the farm belt of the American Middle West...
...Q: Sp how would you define yourself...
...Z," for instance, was ostensibly about the murder of a left-wing Greek Senator, but it was really a classic police-procedure story...
...It wasn't an accident, what happened to Charles Horman...
...We were able to collaborate very well, let's say, after a few days of observation, of mutual observation...
...Debra wants what she wants during shootings or in her life, and that's their problem with her...
...My heroine, as you know, is an FBI agent who goes undercover to infiltrate paramilitary right-wing groups in the farm belt...
...Betrayed is based on a real assassination, the assassination by paramilitary right-wing groups of a Jewish radio talk-show host in Denver, Alan Berg...
...Third, the audience can have a battle with the movie, and a battle is a political act...
...The characters in "Betrayed" are hard-working, caring, family-oriented people who happen to be racist killers...
...Q: Constantin Costa-Gavras, you're known as the world's only commercial-political filmmaker...
...Usually the Greek-born director lives in Paris with his wife, journalist and producer Michele Ray, and their three children...
...But perhaps you intended it that way...
...And given that, the Ambassador could have said, "Do anything you want with your compatriots, but don't touch the Americans...
...If Hanna, as played by Jill Clayburgh, was symbolic of the problems of the Middle East, well, it was hard to get a handle on exactly what was happening in that part of the world...
...So, for example, Charles Horman shows how this technique of torture affects not just the victim but the whole family, the friends...
...Costa-Gavras: I would say that every American has a light and a dark side...
...Maybe if it were about Chile or Greece, I'd have an easier time...
...Especially because some of the peopie I met making State of Siege were killed in the coup: the director of the Chile Bank, a journalist, some other people...
...What I saw in Chile during the time I was there was how completely democratic the Allende government was...
...It used their names, which we didn't do in the movie...
...That's rare in a movie...
...But the personal, emotional confusion of the female protagonist bothered me...
...That's not easy...
...The army, even under Allende, refused to participate and in a certain peculiar way, the Communist Party refused, also...
...On the other hand, the talk-show host is the personification of freedom of speech...
...I'm trying to stay as close as possible to the truth and use real elements...
...Q: Well, what do you think really happened...
...Costa-Gavras: Yes...
...We didn't have any problem...
...I don't think that it ever came out to Kissinger----But the father says it, so I have to say it, too, in the movie, because it's about the father...
...Costa-Gavras: It is said because they deal with direct problems coming from our society and because I'm trying to have, co-incidentally, a journalistic approach...
...They are mistaken human beings...
...Q: That part, I felt, was the movie's strength...
...But what if the lady also has ideas...
...Costa-Gavras: I think they can do a good job, yes...
...Q: Getting back to your Latin American films, State of Siege was actually filmed in Chile during the Allende period...
...Q: I don't wish to be impolite, but it is the opinion of many— myself included—that your Hanna K. was so confused, so neurotic, that one left the theater muttering, "What is she about, anyway...
...But when I got this script by Joe Eszterhas, it clicked...
...Q: Why did you make the centerpiece of Missing the loss of one American life...
...It was important to me to see how people could be that way, that dialectic...
...Q: Some of the critics who attended an early press screening of Betrayed said to me afterwards, "I find it hard to connect with this Costa-Gavras film...
...Right now, in the United States, you have these paramilitary right-wing movements...
...But most people don't know about The Confession...
...I don't feel that the President or Kissinger personally could have known about a small case like the Horman case—or to have given their acceptance for Charles Horman to be sent to jail or that kind of thing...
...I think they can also be as bad as they want...
...What distinguishes Costa-Gavras's films is that while he succeeds at making message films, he does it in such a way that the most apolitical members of his audiences find them entertaining...
...Did I read somewhere in an interview with you, where you said that the U.S...
...People saying, "It's fake, it's not true, we were manipulated...
...For me, that film is something exceptional...
...The book on which Missing was based had many more elements against those guys, even direct accusations...
...The Palestinian in the last scene of the movie, he is not accepted by anyone...
...Debra has ideas...
...The idea of making Z was to do something against the Greek military...
...People say things about her because she's probably too clever and because she knows better than those people what she wants...
...In person, Costa-Gavras seems open, friendly, warm, humorous...
...It is also a country where whatever happens soon comes to us in Europe...
...These litigators were saying, "Who cares about books...
...Costa-Gavras: I'm not sure...
...Q: The striking thing about Betrayed is that you seem to have captured something very special and interesting about the American character, something that Europeans often miss: the simultaneous light and dark side of the national character—the fact that this country contains the Populist and the Klansman, sometimes even in the same person...
...The worst thing is the individualism: trying to explain to a little kid—as the purveyors of this myth do—that you can survive by yourself...
...Do you like the title...
...It was amazing because in Athens at the time, there were something like two-and-a-half million people in the city...
...Some people came to hate us because we said things against the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, and so forth...
...Costa-Gavras: France is important because I'd say my education and culture are more French than Greek...
...Besides, for many years, I've wanted to do an American story...
...It's completely fake...
...Were you surprised...
...And some other people said, "Come on, you cannot do that...
...They are doing a job, a necessary job, in society...
...But he stays at the level of speech...
...When I first met Debra, people said things about her—"she's tough, she's this and that...
...The film has some structural flaws, but it is provocative and beautifully acted...
...Like every group, you have the dark, the very bad side...
...They are guided by the same philosophy, which is a sort of fascistic philosophy: They don't accept differences, don't accept the possibility of freedom of speech, of democracy...
...European Cosmopolitan, with the Greek going first...
...Now this to me is very American...
...Q: One senses with Betrayed that you were delving into the Norman Rockwell image of America and asking what was behind it...
...I mean the FBI received me very well...
...But not every FBI guy is a bad guy...
...France, Greece...
...She has a kind of strength and fragility at the same time...
...I think also in Third World countries an American life has considerably more value than a local life, though not in Charles Horman's case...
...People would say to me, "Oh, your general, you picked him because he looks like our minister...
...I know the tragedy Jean had to live because of these false accusations, fake accusations...
...She represents the audience, me, us...
...Costa-Gavras: Yes, probably...
...Nor have many other directors, for that matter...
...Costa-Gavras: Some people can't accept their own reality, and they are waiting for answers...
...And I'm always trying to find the right vehicle to tell the story...
...Debra Winger plays an FBI agent who infiltrates one paramilitary group and, in the process, nearly loses her sanity and her life...
...I think Hanna K. describes a little bit what happened in that part of the world and what's happening...
...in an interview situation, he is not particularly guarded, Claudia Dreifus is a free-lance writer whose interviews with such subjects as Gore Vidal, Ralph Nader, Nicaragua's Vice President Sergio Ramirez, and Greece's Margarita Papandreou have appeared in The Progressive...
...They disappear...
...The killing of black people and the race crimes that we show in that movie are also real...
...But I've been affected by Latin America, Brazil, the culture of the United States...
...Q: This is the opposite of what you said in State of Siege, where an American, who works for an organization something like the FBI, is a kind of villain...
...The ideal of America, I think...
...Costa-Gavras: All movies are political...
...We went there three years after the colonels were gone, and there were something like 600,000 Greeks who came to see the movie...
...involvement in Central America...
...It's complicated, right...
...They opened that and showed me what kind of guns they have...
...Q: It has often been said of you that your movies are journalistic...
...But on the other hand, I'm convinced also that the Chilean military, if they had from the Embassy a very strong position, "Don't hurt any American," they would not have hurt any Americans...
...It relates to the Le Pen movement in France, it relates to the right-wing movement in Italy, in Spain, in Germany...
...And the accusations, the justifications for the coup that I heard later and repeated by your President, were absolutely unbearable, and so fake—to say those lies, to convince people that it was necessary to have a coup...
...What do you make of that...
...It's important to show women who are that way...
...Why did you put it in there...
...There is all this right-wing resurgence in the world, in France, where I live, and I thought that the story was yes, very American, but also true for all over...
...Costa-Gavras: I don't know...
...But also, I'll tell you, it was important to make Missing as a kind of memorial...
...Costa-Gavras: The Norman Rockwell myth is all over the place—and not just in the United States, thanks partially to American movies and television...
...Qt That must have been a weird experience for you after State of Sieged Costa-Gavras: Well, it was fun...
...To me, it would have been fake to have a clear-cut position that one side is right and the other wrong...
...They said that we play the game of the right-wing people and give them elements to be anticommunist with...
...Q: Male racism...
...I will just give you an example...
...And then, there are other people trying to make movies with political themes—Richard Attenborough, Chris Menges, John Sayles, to name a few...
...He is not likeable—you do not like him...
...Q: What motivated you to make Z? Costa-Gavras: The coup of the colonels...
...He has to run away because he's rejected...
...Q: Is Benjamin Linder's story perhaps the makings of a Costa-Gavras film...
...In the wake of their action, there were all these meetings, and people were saying, "What can we do...
...There was not any risk of becoming a communist country, of not having elections again...
Vol. 52 • September 1988 • No. 9
