Q & A with COSTA-GAVRAS : ‘We Live in Blood and in Time, Not in Fantasyland’

Filmmaker Costa-Gavras is currently at work in Los Angeles on a film about genetic engineering. The Greek-born filmmaker (“Z,” “Missing”) has been a resident of France for decades. Costa-Gavras, 62, recently sat down with journalist Nathan Gardels in Beverly Hills to discuss the state of movie making, particularly in light of Hollywood’s current merger mania. Here is an excerpt of their conversation:

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Question: Worries long expressed by the European film community that American mass culture and the English language will dominate the planet were no doubt furthered by the recent ABC-Disney merger. Are you concerned that culture on a global scale is going to be flattened out and homogenized; that all cultures threaten to be cast in the image of Mickey Mouse? Or do you see the opposite: Monopoly can’t satisfy, leading to a process of mutation, competition and selection that will yield to a new diversity?

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Answer: I see both happening. As a filmmaker who has worked in America as well as Europe, I see this issue of American media concentration as one of David vs. Goliath. I worry about the small guy--European filmmakers like myself. Giants are large and trample all else in their path, but they are also inherently conservative because they have so much to lose. They stick to the formula that has worked in the past.

The small guy has nothing to lose, so he takes risks, he fights to change things.

In France, we talk about the importance of “the cultural exception”--to keep alive the language, the memories and imagination that makes France different.

The small guy will be heard sooner or later, because people get bored with the same old recipe being offered for dinner every night. So let us see what will be exceptional about these new giants, apart from raising the share values of their stockholders.

Q: Would you agree with poet Octavio Paz, who says that in a world of “planetized entertainment,” to use Disney head Michael Eisner’s phrase, the most important things can only be said at the margin?

A: That is an extreme way to put it. Accidents do happen. Important things can be said in blockbuster films.

Q: Democracy is about choice. By and large, Americans just find most French films boring, especially when compared to a “Jurassic Park.” By all box-office accounts, “Jurassic Park” was just as popular among Europeans as it was at home.

A: Of course we like American films, too. After all, the American cinema is truly international because it springs from a culture of immigrants. From everywhere.

The most political films I ever saw were those of Esther Williams, which I loved as a little boy. Why? She was beautiful. She had the biggest car and the thickest carpets I had ever seen. Everybody looked wonderful. This was America! Of course, the camera didn’t show the other side.

Now “Jurassic Park” was nice entertainment. But what happens when it is shown in Europe? When “Jurassic Park,” “The Fugitive” or any other big film comes to Paris, the American distributors dictate the terms: “You can have ‘Jurassic Park’ for 10 or 15 weeks, but to have it you must take another four or five American films to run along with it for two weeks each.”

This is called a train--a locomotive film with cars that follow along. No matter how well the secondary films do, they stay for the number of weeks stipulated in the contract.

Q: Should there then be quotas that limit the exposure of American films?

A: Unfortunately, we need rules so the American occupation is not total. You impose rules on Japanese car imports. Why is it then such a heinous act to impose rules on something vastly more important--culture?

Q: You have been around American film for 25 years. How is it different now than it used to be? What drives Hollywood today?

A: The biggest difference is that the role of real producers has been eroded by the financiers, the bankers and the executives of the big companies that have bought up the studios. It is imperative to them that each film bring in huge amounts of money--each film must top the last blockbuster.

There is only one conversation in Hollywood on Mondays. It is about what film had the largest gross ticket sales over the weekend. The whole ethos of the place is more and more that of the financier than the creator. My film “Missing,” about the disappearance of a young American in Chile during the coup, would be 10 times more difficult to make today.

One really feels the pressure these days to lower the level and the subject matter to the broadest possible audience. The worse thing is that, more and more, a few big stars--some of them great actors and actresses--are running the show. What does it mean that one human being receives $10 million or even $20 million for three months of work?

And then his biggest fear is that his star will dim because he won’t be able to draw as much for the next film. This creates a whole enterprise around a star that has little to do with the spirit of artistic performance. The actor here is no longer in service of the story; the story is in service to the actor. The story disappears.

Q: Michael Eisner offers this rationale for the worldwide appeal of American films: “Diversity of individual opportunity, individual choice and individual expression is what American entertainment imparts--and that is what people everywhere want.”

A: What individual? What diversity? At Disney, 10 or 15 people make the decisions and all the rest follow like an army. Eisner speaks like a politician, saying things that make people feel good and sleep better. It is propaganda. Disney sells its products with nice words and comforting formulas.

Of course, everyone wants to be an individual and to have opportunity. But not everyone can be president, and not everyone can be the champion. Perhaps it appeals because it is so far from the hard truth. We don’t live in Disneyland. We live in blood and in time, not in Fantasyland. We live in a tragic world.

Q: We can’t just blame Disney for flattening culture with milk and water concoctions. Because technology has homogenized time and space, hasn’t experience itself flattened out?

A: With the advent of global companies, there is a kind of worldwide imitation that produces the same buildings, the same planes, the same cars. But this conformity of technical backdrops itself inspires a certain resistance, in the arts and architecture, even in the punks with their green or red hair. More dangerously, perhaps, religious and ethnic resistance to homogeneity also arises. This is the so-called confrontation between jihad and “McWorld.”

In the end, our cultural DNA--the language and a way of seeing the world rooted in a particular history; the spirit--is still what matters. Technology is an extension of our hands and our feet, not our spirit. It is the spirit that makes us different and offers plenty of material for interesting movies. That is why we need to preserve cultures.

Q: Most of your films have been about politics and social injustice. The film you are working on now is about genetics. Why genetics?

A: Because developments in genetics--from the discovery and correction of hereditary diseases such as Alzheimer’s to mapping of the human genome that will, eventually, enable the redesign of the species--will transform our lives radically. For the first time, we can correct nature. Humankind thus has the potential of creating hell and paradise, of eliminating illness, but also, for example, of eliminating ethnic groups and creating master races.

Parents will have the ability to design their dream child just like their dream house. This kind of choice which can tend toward elimination of differences is very dangerous.

* Nathan Gardels is editor of Global Viewpoint, the international service of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. 1995 New Perspectives Quarterly.