Costa-Gavras (short for Konstantinos Gavras; born 12 February 1933) is a Greek-French film director, screenwriter, and producer who lives and works in France. He is known for political films, such as the political thriller Z (1969), which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Missing (1982), for which he won the Palme d'Or and an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Most of his films have been made in French, but six of them were made in English.
Early life
Costa-Gavras was born in Loutra Iraias, Arcadia. His family spent the Second World War in a village in the Peloponnese, and moved to Athens after the war. His father had been a member of the Pro-Soviet branch of the Greek Resistance, and was imprisoned during the Greek Civil War. His father's Communist Party membership made it impossible for Costa-Gavras to attend university in Greece or to be granted a visa to the United States, so after high school he settled in France, where he began studying literature at the Sorbonne in 1951.
Early career
In 1956, he left his university studies to study film at the French national film school, IDHEC. After film school, he apprenticed under Yves Allégret, and became an assistant director for Jean Giono and René Clair. After several further positions as first assistant director, he directed his first feature film, The Sleeping Car Murders, in 1965.
Political-commercial film
Costa-Gavras is known for merging controversial political issues with the entertainment value of commercial cinema. Law and justice, oppression, legal/illegal violence, and torture are common subjects in his work, especially relevant to his earlier films. Costa-Gavras is an expert of the "statement" picture. In most cases, the targets of Costa-Gavras's work have been right wing or far right movements and regimes, including the Greek military in Z, and right-wing dictatorships that ruled much of Latin America during the height of the Cold War, as in State of Siege and Missing.
In a broader sense, this emphasis continues with Amen. given its focus on the conservative leadership of the Catholic Church during the 1940s. In this political context, The Confession provides the exception, dealing as it does with oppression on the part of a Communist regime during the Stalinist period.
Influences
When Costa-Gavras asked about some of his biggest cinematic influences, he replied: The first movie I saw at the Cinematheque was Erich von Stroheim's Greed, and I was astonished to see you could do long movies with no happy ending. Kurosawa, no doubt, was a big influence. Movies sometimes more than directors have influenced me: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Ford, was an extraordinary discovery. Sergei Eisenstein, of course. Later on, Ingmar Bergman. He also listed René Clément, Jacques Demy, and Gillo Pontecorvo's film The Battle of Algiers as an influence on his filmmaking. According to his son Romain Gavras, Costa-Gavras used to show all of Tarkovsky's films to him at a young age.
