Costa Gavras

In the late 1960s, Costa-Gavras couldn't persuade any French producer or distributor to make his political thriller "Z," which went on to win the Oscar for the best foreign language film of 1969. "It was an unusual movie," says the 76-year-old filmmaker, born in Greece as Konstantinos Gavras. "There was no love story and there were several characters going through it. It was difficult to explain.

"Only God Forgives," Nicolas Winding Refn's follow-up to "Drive", will have its North American premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival next month. Starring Ryan Gosling as an American expat living in Bangkok, Thailand, the film joins the critically acclaimed "Fruitvale Station" as one of two Gala screenings for the festival, which runs June 13-23 at L.A. Live's Regal Cinemas downtown. "The Way, Way Back," a comedy starring Steve Carell, Toni Collette and Sam Rockwell, will close the festival.

If they gave out Oscars for stirring up controversy, Costa-Gavras, the cinema's most celebrated auteur provocateur , would have a crowded trophy room. Reviled by the right, denounced by the left, the 54-year-old Greek-born French director has an unfailing knack for setting off ideological furors. Is it any wonder?

Greece's new Acropolis Museum said Tuesday that it would restore references to early Christians vandalizing the ancient Parthenon temple, which were deleted from a film shown to visitors for fear of angering the country's powerful Orthodox Church. The decision last month to delete the short segment angered the film's creator, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Costa-Gavras, and was criticized in the Greek press as an act of censorship. The controversy came just over a month after the opening of the new museum.

"This is not a controversial film," said an emphatic Tony Thomopoulos, chairman and chief executive officer of United Artists. Sounding like a man who didn't want a battle like the one over "The Last Temptation of Christ" on his hands, Thomopoulos added: "This is a very powerful, moving film. The first time I saw it I was emotionally drained. This is the kind of film that you go home and think about for a week."

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.

COSTA-GAVRAS is a master of politically charged cinema, with films that are often thinly disguised fictionalized versions of ripped-from-the-headline stories with a strong liberal bent. Over the last four decades, he's taken on conservative regimes in his native Greece, as well as in Uruguay and Chile. He's explored Nazi war criminals living a covert existence in America and the white separatist movement. His political activism comes easy to him.

In his long career as a politically conscious filmmaker, Costa-Gavras has studied the ways of military dictators, assassins, clandestine intelligence operatives, war criminals and neo-Nazi extremists. But his new film took him into an even more unnerving terrain--the world of local TV news.

"Only God Forgives," Nicolas Winding Refn's follow-up to "Drive", will have its North American premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival next month. Starring Ryan Gosling as an American expat living in Bangkok, Thailand, the film joins the critically acclaimed "Fruitvale Station" as one of two Gala screenings for the festival, which runs June 13-23 at L.A. Live's Regal Cinemas downtown. "The Way, Way Back," a comedy starring Steve Carell, Toni Collette and Sam Rockwell, will close the festival.

Greece's new Acropolis Museum said Tuesday that it would restore references to early Christians vandalizing the ancient Parthenon temple, which were deleted from a film shown to visitors for fear of angering the country's powerful Orthodox Church. The decision last month to delete the short segment angered the film's creator, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Costa-Gavras, and was criticized in the Greek press as an act of censorship. The controversy came just over a month after the opening of the new museum.

In the late 1960s, Costa-Gavras couldn't persuade any French producer or distributor to make his political thriller "Z," which went on to win the Oscar for the best foreign language film of 1969. "It was an unusual movie," says the 76-year-old filmmaker, born in Greece as Konstantinos Gavras. "There was no love story and there were several characters going through it. It was difficult to explain.

COSTA-GAVRAS is a master of politically charged cinema, with films that are often thinly disguised fictionalized versions of ripped-from-the-headline stories with a strong liberal bent. Over the last four decades, he's taken on conservative regimes in his native Greece, as well as in Uruguay and Chile. He's explored Nazi war criminals living a covert existence in America and the white separatist movement. His political activism comes easy to him.

"Amen.," Costa-Gavras' highest-profile film in years, is steeped in the tradition of the director's landmark film "Z" and his subsequent political thrillers, which combine suspense with jolting expose. In this instance Costa-Gavras is covering familiar territory yet is able to evoke the horror of widespread complacency to human suffering of genocidal proportions.

WHEN Costa-Gavras, a young Paris-based filmmaker, returned to his native Greece to make his 1969 "Z," an expose of the military junta's ruthless seizure of power in 1966, he brought a raw documentary realism to the fast-paced thriller form with such style and urgency that the film became an international classic.

In his long career as a politically conscious filmmaker, Costa-Gavras has studied the ways of military dictators, assassins, clandestine intelligence operatives, war criminals and neo-Nazi extremists. But his new film took him into an even more unnerving terrain--the world of local TV news.

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.

The American Film Institute's weeklong, 12-program European Community Film Festival, which begins Friday at the Monica 4-Plex in Santa Monica, gets off to a smashing start with France's entry, Costa-Gavras' first comedy, "Family Business." Remarkably, most of the films that follow it are equally impressive, a rare and welcome instance of a film festival stressing quality over quantity.

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.

There is no gloom, frustration and rage to match a filmmaker's whose film has apparently been prejudged by its distributor as a commercial bust and is effectively abandoned at birth, before audiences have had a chance to vote for themselves. So it seemed with Bruno Barreto's "A Show of Force." It was not quite abandoned by Paramount.

Perhaps, in our movies, we've grown too accustomed to the slick, the violent and the ersatz. When great pure dramatic subjects come up--evil in our century, brutality versus conscience--do we know how to handle them anymore? Costa-Gavras' "Music Box" (throughout San Diego County) focuses on a crisis of conscience within a young Chicago lawyer (Jessica Lange) defending her father (Armin Mueller-Stahl) at a deportation hearing where he is accused of Holocaust-era crimes.