POLITICS, FILM MAKE IDEAL BEDFELLOWS FOR COSTA-GAVRAS

If movies reflect life, then why are there not more movies reflecting the reality of today’s world with its political, social and economic turmoil?

“For one thing, the news changes too fast (for film makers) to keep up with it,” said Costa-Gavras, one of the most consistently relevant--and controversial--commercial film makers, at his home here.

“Also, the issues facing us today, such as terrorism, apartheid . . . are very complicated, and must not be dealt with simplistically. There is not an issue I would not touch, but you need just the right story, and right now I haven’t got one,” he said.

In fact, Costa-Gavras, whose films include the Oscar-winning “Z,” “State of Siege,” “Missing” and the highly provocative “Hannah K,” was last represented in theaters here with the independently financed “Family Business,” which he termed “an entertainment.” But, he added, “There is a political dimension in this (film) too.

“It is about a bourgeois French family in the business of safecracking. But the focus is on the family’s 12-year-old son, who decides he wants to live differently and who struggles to set himself free from the family business.” (The film has not been critically nor financially well received here.)

“Just as society changes, directors change,” Costa-Gavras said. “In most of my movies, I have dealt with oppression and the state, and I cannot continue to tell these same stories over and over again. As a director, I have to find something different to say, to explore.”

He said he was trying to tell a different kind of story, from a different point of view, with “Hannah K,” his 1984 film starring Jill Clayburgh as an Israeli who comes to sympathize with the Palestinian cause. “There are very strong and emotional views, pro and con, on this very complex subject. Few people understood, or wanted to understand the particular point of view in that film.

“The problem with movies generally, and with movies on political subjects in particular, is that you need a minimum audience to be on the side of the movie. This will create greater interest in discussion, and this in turn will create a commercial success. If there is no interest or discussion, the picture fades.”

Costa-Gavras, whose films frequently have run counter to popular thinking, said films that try to tackle contemporary issues run the risk of offending “the audiences’ own convictions,” especially in today’s conservative climate.

“Even ‘Z’ and ‘Missing’ went against a lot of people’s convictions,” he said of his two most commercially successful films, both of them fact-based political thrillers focusing on oppressive, right-wing governments. “But there were others who accepted the films even though they didn’t accept their message.”

Costa-Gavras contrasted the reactions to such films, which at their best have been criticized for combining politics with entertainment, with currently popular Hollywood films such as “Rambo” and “Rocky IV.”

“These are very strongly political films, and since their message is strongly anti-Russian, anti-communist, they certainly represent a form of propaganda,” said Costa-Gavras. “But they are not called propaganda, because they don’t go against (current) convictions.

“We have been taught for a long time to see the Russians in one way, and to present them in another way would take a great deal of effort,” he said. “If a film maker were to try to show a few positive things about the Russians, I think it would be very hard to get that film made today.” He called such attitudes an outgrowth of “the moral values we live with today.”

However, Costa-Gavras, who said he is working on a film project for Universal Pictures about “television in America in the future,” expressed the view that attitudes and the movies that reflect them will change in the near future.

“Movies, like politics, move with the swing of the pendulum,” he said. “We have gone very far astray (in movies), even to outer space, but I think we will come back again.”