Costa-Gavras is a Greek-French filmmaker who is commonly associated with thrillers concerned with political stories, though his oeuvre is much more varied in style and theme.
Still perhaps best known for Z (1969) and Missing (1982), two political thrillers of the highest order, Gavras’ filmography also includes a recurring interest in the holocaust (Music Box [1989] and Amen. [2003]), the media (Betrayed [1988] and Mad City [1997]), nationhood (Hanna K. [1983], Eden Is West [2009]), as well as a recent interest in economic stories told with back comedy: Le Couperet (2005) and Le Capital (2012). He is currently the president of the Cinémathèque Française, a position he has held twice and spanning ten years.
Costa premiered Le Capital at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. We were thrilled to host Costa at our TIFF studio space, Onsite [at] OCAD U, where we talked in-depth about his latest film, its relationship to his body of work as a whole, working with Gad Elmaleh, and even touched on some of his less commented upon films.
Our interview with Costa-Gavras was a feature interview in the tenth monthly issue of The Seventh Art as a “video magazine.” It was released in January 2013 and was shot as part of our Toronto International Film Festival coverage. Other TIFF 2012 interviews on video from that year include Thomas Vinterberg, Margarethe von Trotta, Ben Wheatley, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Miguel Gomes, Ernie Gehr, João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata, Matías Piñeiro, Peter Mettler, Rodney Ascher & Tim Kirk, and William Vega.
