Costa-Gavras is one of the few directors who gets the credit “A Costa-Gavras Film” or “A film by Costa-Gavras” in the marketing of his movies. There’s auteur theory that matters to the artists, but when it comes to getting people into the theater, only a few names are signifiers to an audience. But in a world of Spielbergs, Bays and Camerons, what does Costa-Gavras represent?
Even I had to go back and revisit his Academy Award winner Z before this interview. I knew the films Missing and Mad City, but missed his recent output. When I saw Capital,I was reminded what Costa-Gavras meant. Set in a world high powered international banks, Capital deconstructs our social financial institutions via the dramatic character of Marc Tourneuil (Gad Elmaleh), a young executive who gets corrupted on his rise to the top. Capital opens in New York this weekend and Los Angeles next week. We got to speak with Costa-Gavras about the themes of his latest movie, and his career.
CraveOnline: Is one of the themes of Capital that this is all fun and games to the banks, but it’s our lives they’re playing with?
Costa-Gavras: [Laughs] It was interesting to go through this world which I, little by little, have discovered by reading books and meeting people who worked in the banks. I met some important people in the big French banks. It was a real discovery to me because they were all very attractive, very interesting, very educated and at the same time I knew what they were doing was really quite different from what they were saying.
Did any of the people you met express any regret for some of their customers who are now in bad shape because of the banks’ decisions?
Yes, as a matter of fact, what I really discovered is that they are societies completely. Our elected people are very week in front of them. I didn’t believe it at the beginning and little by little it became more clear to me. Especially when I had the chance to speak with a couple of politicians saying, “We depend on the money. We depend on them.” Later on when the French government decided, “You have to create some rules,” they stood up and said, “It will kill us” and the government pulled back.
You’re saying politicians are weak when it comes to the banks?
Oh yes, I think our leaders don’t have enough power to make regulations for them. A funny thing is, when they talk about the problems, they say, “Okay, we have to be regulated.” At the same time they lobby not to be regulated.
That’s the same in this country too. There was a huge bailout but there’s still no recourse for things like predatory lending that happened only a few years ago.
Your banks and people who run them, and same all over the world, the Western world, now the Eastern world probably, they live in a kind of society which is their society. I don’t believe they care so much about the rest of the world.
But if we all said, “No, we’re not going to give you our money,” they’d have nothing to play with, would they?
Yes, and the other problem I have discovered is that all of them are depending on the stockholders. Who finally runs the whole system is the stockholders because if these bankers don’t do exactly what the stockholders ask them or need to do, they are fired. It’s kind of a bizarre situation for democracies.
It is a movie about banks. You still saw it as a very cinematic, widescreen movie?
Yes, it’s also in a sense a movie about a human being who gets into it. He has some ethics at the beginning, and little by little he submits himself to that system completely. He becomes, in a certain way, king and he would like to stay king. He also gets rid of his woman and the other woman. The only thing he cares about is to be up there.
As far as the visual language of the film, it’s not flashy but it is very grand and cinematic. How did you think about how you wanted to portray this world with the camera?
Oh, it was important to portray a whole society. They are living apart from the normal people. It’s a kind of rich society. They live in very luxurious places. They deal with other people like them so it was important to show that society in which they live.
And it’s international, so you use every language?
Of course international. It’s an international world in which there are business enemies among them, but at the same time they live in the same world. They have the same interests and even if they fight, finally it’s a small group of however many there are. I think there’s a few thousand, even less than a few thousand. Probably only hundreds of them. I read in a book that the president of the French bank said, “For us, democracy is a kind of placebo.”
Was there ever any pressure to make the film in English?
No, they speak all kinds of languages so part of it is in English, part of it is in French. Doing it all in English would be fake, is my feeling. When people in France are together, they’re working among them, they are speaking French, but they speak so many languages, sometimes they speak three or four different languages. They switch from one language to another. The other problem I had is they have an economic language which is impossible to understand, and would also be impossible to subtitle because when they speak English or French, they introduce the economic language which is not easy to understand for people who are not used to it. So I have to simplify it.
Why did you decide to have Marc address the camera in the beginning and end of the movie?
Because I would like him to show that he intends to create a kind of direct relationship with the audience. Instead of being a third person who tells the story, I would like him to tell the story and I would like him also to finish the story himself, and to create a different relationship with the audience.
