Costa-Gavras: Willing Prisoner of Greek Tradition : Movies: His latest film, ‘Music Box,’ is Greek to the core. Its heroine, like Antigone, has to pay for something she didn’t do.

Though he’s lived in Paris since the age of 19, Greek-born director Constantin Costa-Gavras can’t escape the tragic tradition.

“That’s the problem with Greeks,” he says in heavily accented English. “There’s this extraordinary weight behind us--borne of the light, the landscape, the food, Mediterranean passions. It’s a weight but also wings. It can go either way. My wings are made out of metal. They’re very, very heavy.”

Those who have followed Costa-Gavras’ 25-year career would tend to agree. “Z,” Oscar winner for best foreign language film in 1969, dealt with an assassination in his homeland. “Special Section” focused on the infamy of the French Vichy regime during World War II. “Missing,” the director’s first English-language film, was based on a true story about a young American free-lance journalist who vanished during the 1973 overthrow of the Chilean government.

Broad in scope and patently political, Costa-Gavras’ work is light-years away from the farces and small, ironic films favored by so many of his French colleagues.

“Music Box,” which opened in Los Angeles, New York, and Toronto on Christmas Day and is scheduled for nationwide release Jan. 19, is also Greek to the core: the story of a lawyer (Jessica Lange) who, in the course of defending her Hungarian-born father (Armin Mueller-Stahl) against charges of Nazi war crimes, is confronted with a painful moral dilemma.

“Like Antigone, she’s an innocent who has to pay for something she didn’t do,” says Costa-Gavras, sipping black coffee in his Four Seasons Hotel suite. “She follows her father’s destiny at the expense of her own. It’s also a love story--a look at a father-daughter relationship. Despite her passion to believe he’s not guilty, the trial changes everything. The first man, the best man, in her life, she suspects, has betrayed her.”

Comparisons have been drawn between “Music Box” and “Betrayed,” Costa-Gavras’ 1988 film about an FBI agent (Debra Winger) who falls in love with a seemingly ordinary man (Tom Berenger) who turns out to be a dangerous after-hours kingpin of a white-supremacy organization.

“The human potential for violence is one of my recurring themes,” he says. “That and the absolute necessity for justice and dignity in our lives. Human beings are a mystery . . . very, very, complicated. Natural mechanisms of life become perverted and become elements for oppression. You look at good people and discover a monster inside. That makes for good film making.”

Costa-Gavras and Joe Eszterhas, who also wrote “Betrayed,” spent months going through transcripts of extradition trials, and found much of their inspiration for “Music Box” in the case of John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland auto worker whom the Israelis accused of being a murderous guard at a Nazi war camp in Poland. Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel, convicted and is now under sentence of death.

“I’d thought that all the old war criminals ended up in South America or, to a lesser degree, South Africa,” says Costa-Gavras. “But the U.S. government let them in for industrial and scientific reasons. Wernher von Braun was one. Many were also part of a spy apparatus used to combat communism.

“While the theatrical Nuremberg Trials were being conducted to show the world that the Allies were punishing Nazis, (Klaus) Barbie and hundreds of others were cooperating with the U.S. Secret Service. That was official policy. The interest of the nation-state took precedence. I find that kind of ‘legal’ crime much more insidious than the Mafia.”

Costa-Gavras considered casting Debra Winger in the lead of “Music Box,” too. “But for ethnical reasons,” he says with a laugh, “I decided it wouldn’t work.”

Though he had been following her career since “King Kong” days, Lange wasn’t an obvious alternative. “This role was the furthest one from herself Jessica has ever played. ‘Frances,’ at least, was a glamorous person dealing in a fancy world. Here, she’s a common everyday American woman--not the pretty lady she is. She says she tried to be someone no one would look at a second time. They’re also different on a psychological level. Jessica is private, emotional, very secret. On the set, she’s alone a lot, protecting herself and her character. The character, on the other hand, is superrational.”

For the key role of Lange’s father, Costa-Gavras wagered on Mueller-Stahl--a firmly established European actor (“Lola” and the Academy Award-nominated “Colonel Redl”) with no American profile to speak of.

“There are a lot of great American actors who could play someone in his late 60s,” says the director. “Jack Lemmon, Kirk Douglas, Walter Matthau, Ed Asner . . . I could go on. But they all have an ‘image.’ I didn’t want the audience to say, ‘Oh, Lemmon, he’s a good guy all the way.’ I was looking for someone abstract, a person whom the audience could discover through his gestures just who he is.”

Though the politically liberal director has had his differences with this country, the “Hollywood sensibility” infuses his films.

“I have great admiration for American movies,” he says. “All my generation in Europe was nourished by the good ones. We saw a lot of them after World War II. Most of them were made by immigrants, outsiders who wanted to be insiders--people looking for home, the lost paradise, ‘Rosebud.’ That longing for a better world, I hope, finds its way into my films.”

Costa-Gavras also finds the “passions” in this country more conducive to his brand of film making. “Despite the extraordinary events of the past year, Europeans are probably a lot more cynical,” he says. “When it comes down to it, they’ve seen too much. Their traditions are just too strong.

“Armin (Mueller-Stahl) is so proud of his fellow Germans--but when those thousands of Germans get together to demonstrate, they still stay off the grass. That’s wonderful and scary at the same time. Eszterhas’ script is, for me, the ideal American romantic point of view: people fighting for justice, even nastily, but for good reasons.”

And Costa-Gavras’ mission in the $14-million film? Not finger-pointing or accusation, he insists, but keeping the issue alive.

“This is a movie about memory,” he says. “I don’t have the right to ‘forgive’ since I didn’t suffer personally or lose my mother or brother in the war. But I can insist that we remember.

“In the end, that’s what this film is,” he adds softly. “Just a small drop of memory.”