"You never know if films have an impact on people. For me, it was (seeing on screen) Marlon Brando who made me want to smoke... Afterwards, when you're steeped in a anger, I don't know if seeing a movie will stop it," Costa-Gavras' son said in an interview with AFP on the Lido.

"On the other hand, to give the vision, as the Greek tragedy did, of a dark future, it's interesting", continues the director, who has freed himself from any concern for realism for this punchy film, at the aesthetic halfway between "Gladiator" and "Apocalypse Now", which plunges into a city of fire and blood.

In the film (online September 23 on Netflix), which imprints on the ancient theater, the insurrection rises in a disadvantaged city, which seeks justice after the death of a young person.

Off-screen, France falls into a civil war fueled by provocations from the far right.

Such a dystopia "allows you to explore a nightmare, what things could become, and to tell it with a symbolic form", underlines the filmmaker, author of numerous music videos, from Jamie XX to Kanye West via MIA.

"I had total freedom" to shoot, specifies Romain Gavras, who caused controversy fifteen years ago with an ultra-violent clip for Justice.

"People's reactions do not necessarily make mass", evacuates the artist, who believes that "it is not the films that throw oil on the fire".

"In the first line"

If he refuses any diagnosis or political "message", Gavras feeds in "Athena" on the news of recent years, from the repression of demonstrations of "yellow vests" to the rise of the far right.

"The acceleration towards the worst, we feel it all over the world, in France, in Greece, in the United States... We are nourished by everything when we make a film", he explains.

"When a country is fragile, it's very easy to push it over the precipice and exploit a general atmosphere," notes the director, like the far right spreading toxic rumors in "Athena".

By borrowing from ancient mythology, "we wanted to show in a timeless way that the tensions we are experiencing now are the tensions we have experienced since ancient Greece or even prehistory... It's always the same thing, different interests which lead to war, to conflict. And on the ground, it is the people who have an intimate pain who are going to be on the front line".

At 41, Romain Gavras, who co-founded the collective of filmmakers Kourtrajmé two decades ago, admits sharing with his father Costa-Gavras, 89, "a way of looking at the world in a non-Manichean way, where everything is a little more complex than the good guys and the bad guys, which you have to try to figure out and shape" on the screen.

What lessons do we learn from a father like him, a living monument of political cinema, author of masterpieces like "Z" or "L'avou"?

"I learned from him about rigor... and brushing your teeth every morning!"

© 2022 AFP