Costa-Gavras Quotes

#1. In the U.S., some extraordinary movies have been made on politics and social issues. We learned lots of things from American cinema. But in the last ten or fifteen years, this has changed drastically. Today, that kind of movie is much easier to make in Europe.

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#2. Technology is an extension of our hands and our feet, not our spirit.

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#3. I saw money becoming more and more important everywhere. It's one of the most abstract and important inventions by human beings. At the same time, money is capable of extraordinary corruption in every kind of relationship. I tried to see how and why, more and more, money is becoming a religion.

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#4. Aggressive capitalism leads the world, and we can see the results, especially in Europe: more poverty for the vast majority, and more riches for a few.

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#5. I decided to go to the cinema school because I thought it was a new sort of media. Nowadays, it's not anymore, but in the '50s, cinema had a half century of age. Today it's more than one century. I thought it was a new media, a new way of telling stories.

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#6. You know every time you change a decade, it's a problem, because you approach the end little by little. But my decision is to keep going. The problem is always to know when the head doesn't work well. Someone has to tell you. I hope my children will tell me.

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#7. I initially studied literature [in France], and then I went to cinema school. I discovered the Cinematheque, and saw not only action movies and westerns, but also lots of serious movies.

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#8. Essentially, filmmakers have to be free and not directed by power or politicians.

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#9. The American influence is not so aggressive anymore. The American big business influence in Latin America is not as strong, so people can vote and they can have a different life than before. They can have more liberal, more interesting, and more democratic governments.

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#10. In the U.S. more than any other place, the banking system is insane. Millions of Americans lost their houses. Because of what? Because of the banking system. This American banking system is also coming to Europe. We can say today that the banks and high financiers run the world.

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#11. We don't live in Disneyland. We live in blood and in time, not in Fantasyland. We live in a tragic world.

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#12. We saw what happens with Bolsheviks. It was another catastrophe. I don't have the solution. The moviemaker can ask questions but not give solutions.

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#13. Every morning you have the economic news from all over the world, from television, radio, the Internet, and an hour later the news changes and the numbers change. People run fast from one place to another, which is very risky because they don't have enough time to think.

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#14. Sometimes there are leftwing governments I'm very critical of. For me, being leftwing is to live in a society where there's permanent change. It also means to respect the freedom of everybody, and to not accept big organizations or rich, powerful people holding power.

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#15. [Akiro] 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.

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#16. Many years ago making movies was something. It was the major entertainment just to go to the cinema, once, twice a week. At the time, something like 400 million people went to the movies.

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#17. This crisis started probably due to the freedom they gave to the banks. First President [Ronald] Reagan and then President [Bill] Clinton. So, for [Barack] Obama it is extremely difficult to change now, to find a way to organize this banking system [differently].

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#18. People say "the Americans" or "the United States," as if it was a kind of bloc. It's not. There's a lot of people thinking differently from other people in the U.S. This is very interesting to me and very important.

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