Costa-Gavras.

• Author: Rampell, Ed
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Costa-Garras is arguably the world's greatest living political filmmaker.

Born in Arcadia, Greece, in 1933, to the son of a blacklisted father, Costa-Garras immigrated to France when he was a student. Like others of his generation, including Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Costa-Garras fell in love with film at Paris's renowned Cinematheque and studied movies at France's national film school, IDHEC. After serving as Rene Clair's assistant director, Costa-Gavras began directing stylish films known for their dissident sensibility.

His 1969 fact-based film Z, about police repression and the colonels' coup in Greece, won a Cannes Jury Prize and is one of the tare subtitled movies nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award. Z was also nominated for Best Writing and Best Director Oscars. It scored Oscars for Best Editing and Best Foreign Language Film, in addition to winning a Golden Globe.

Aside from Z, Costa-Gavras's oeuvre includes: 1973's State of Siege, about urban guerrilla warfare in South America; 1982's Cannes Palme d'Or-winning Missing in which Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek play Americans searching for a loved one in Chile after General Pinochet's bloody coup; 1983's pro-Palestinian Hannah K.; 1988's Betrayed, co-starring Debra Winger and Tom Berenger as a member of a rightwing militia; 1989's Music Box, with Jessica Lange scoring ah Oscar nomination as a lawyer defending her father charged with committing Nazi war crimes; 1997's Mad City, co-starring John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman in a drama about media sensationalism; and 2002's heartbreaking Amen, wherein a German officer and priest try to save the Jews by informing Pope Pius XII about the Holocaust.

His latest film, Capital, is about the financial crisis and the power of banks.

In person, Costa-Gavras looks much younger than his eighty years. He is thoughtful and philosophical and speaks in lightly accented English. I interviewed him in a West Hollywood hotel and reminded him that we had met once before, in 1975, when as a Hunter College film student and aspiring journalist, I wrote my first paid article. It was about him.

Q: Why did you make your new film, Capital?

Costa-Gavras: I decided more than ten years ago now to make a movie about money. I saw money becoming more and more important everywhere. It's one of the most abstract and important inventions by human beings. At the same time, money is capable of extraordinary corruption in every kind of relationship. I tried to see how and why, more and more, money is becoming a religion. That was the initial idea.

Q: Capital touches upon...