San Sebastian (Spain) (AFP)
Costa-Gavras is 86 years old, with a smile on his face and an intact passion for cinema, an art that "has already changed the world," says the Greco-French director in an interview with several media, at the Festival of San Sebastián. (September 20-28).
Described by the Spanish festival as "one of the greatest representatives of political cinema and social denunciation" of the last 50 years, Costa-Gavras received Saturday the honorary prize Donostia for his entire career.
"Turning a film is like a love story, you can not live two, three or four years with a story without loving it deeply," he says, receiving the foreign press in a sequel. Hotel Maria Cristina, with impeccable elegance and a good communicative mood.
Born in 1933 in the Greek region of Arcadia, in the heart of the Peloponnese, he emigrated to Paris at the age of 22, when he spoke barely French.
Since then, his cinema has dealt with a number of political dramas: the dictatorship of the Greek colonels in "Z" (Oscar for best foreign film and best editing in 1969), the Uruguayan dictatorship in "State of siege" (1972), the disappearances in following the coup d'état of Pinochet in Chile in "Missing" (Palme d'Or 1982 ex-aequo in Cannes), Nazism in "Music box" (1989) and "Amen" (2002), the emigration of Middle East to Europe in "Eden to the West" (2009) ...
A work that has evolved "with my perception of things, with my age and my experience", but "everything I do, I try to do it with passion" and cinema is "an art that has changed the world "he says.
Because with the cinema "we can see how other people live, we can see naked people, something previously impossible," he amuses himself, "see homosexuals" ...
This time, he is present in San Sebastian with "Adults in the room", the adaptation of the book of the same name of the ephemeral Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis, in office less than six months in 2015 until his resignation . A book that chronicles the minister's battle with Europe in an attempt to put an end to the austerity policies in his country.
The filmmaker explains that he began to glean elements of the Greek crisis from its beginning, at the moment of the introduction of the first measures of austerity, and then found the thread of the narrative in the book that Yanis Varoufakis was preparing.
He "started sending me one chapter after another and we started talking and designing the script", explains Costa-Gavras, who finally bought the adaptation rights of the book, published in 2017, and sees this former minister a man "consistent, who resists".
- "Change things together" -
The result is a compact and sarcastic drama in which, from office to office and from capital to capital, Yanis Varoufakis (Christos Loulis) fights against his European counterparts, and in particular the powerful and intractable German Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (Ulrich Tukur) .
The few breaths come from the music, "one more character, which help the Greek characters to express themselves and to be more credible," slips the filmmaker.
The crisis of the Greek debt was quite an existential problem for Europe, an episode of which Costa-Gavras makes a particular reading.
Referring to the harshness of Germany during this process, he admits that a "state has no friends but interests". However, this reasoning "does not stick in Europe", he says; "we have to change things together, if we do not do it, we are not European".
As for the future of the left, his prognosis is not very flattering, at least for France where he lives, and for Greece, where the radical left - the party Syriza - lost power this year.
"The need of the left is there, the philosophy of the left is there, but the people able to make it work do not exist," he thinks.
© 2019 AFP