Born Konstantinos Gavras in 1933 at Klivia in the Peloponnese. During the War, his father had been a member of the Communist-dominated wing of the Resistance and, after the war, was repeatedly imprisoned; the resulting blacklist prevented Costa from attending university, holding a government post, getting a driver's license, or even a visa for the U.S.A.
Emigrating to France, he studied at the Sorbonne and at IDHEC, France's top film school, and discovered the world of film at screenings at the Cinémathèque Française. For six years he worked as an assistant director, becoming friends with Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, who then agreed to star in the neophyte director's first film, the gripping thriller Sleeping Car Murders – along with Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jacques Perrin, Michel Piccoli, and Signoret's daughter Catherine Allégret. This was a non-political work; the director felt he was too inexperienced to make a protest work.
His next film Un homme de trop, an action- and star-packed Resistance drama, was retitled Shock Troops, dubbed and re-cut for U.S. release; Costa-Gavras vowed never again to eschew final cut. His next film, Z. was at last the kind of political film he had wanted to make: it made him world famous. Having outraged the right, he then outraged the left by making The Confession, with Montand again, here as a Czech Communist victim of a Stalinist show trial, stylistically moving further into fast cutting, along with numerous flashbacks and flash-forwards. Completing a political trilogy, all starring Montand, Costa-Gavras now roused controversy in the U.S. with State of Siege (it was summarily yanked from the American Film Institute Theater's opening week at the Kennedy Center in Washington), a recounting of the kidnapping and eventual assassination of a U.S. AID worker in Uruguay by the Tupamoros, allegedly because he trained government torturers.
In 1975, he took on a French historical scandal in Special Section, on the judicial murder of six scapegoats by the Vichy regime, purportedly to avert massive reprisals after the killing of German officer by the Resistance. In 1979, he had his first outright flop with his only attempt at a conventional romance, Clair de Femme, with Montand and Romy Schneider. In his first English language film, Missing (1982), Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek played real-life parents looking for their son, missing in the wake of Allende's coup in Chile, with a direct implication of the US embassy's complicity in his eventual murder and the coup overall, winning the Palme d'or at Cannes, an Oscar for adapted screenplay, and a libel suit by the actual U.S. ambassador and two of his aides. (The case was eventually dismissed.)
Hanna K (1983) proved in some ways his hottest potato, with Jill Clayburgh as a fictional Jewish-American Israeli lawyer, who, despite being married, gets involved in affairs with her Palestinian client, as well chief prosecutor Gabriel Byrne, garnering an accusation of "unconscious anti-Semitism" from critic David Denby. After the change of pace crime comedy Family Business (1986), he returned to a political subject in English, Betrayed (1988), with FBI agent Debra Winger being distracted by love while infiltrating Tom Berenger's underground racist group in Middle America.
In Music Box (1989), Hungarian-American lawyer Jessica Lange must defend her beloved immigrant father Armin Mueller-Stahl from an accusation of war crimes, keeping the audience guessing "is he or isn't he?" until the final scene, a story loosely base on the John Demjanjuk case. In Mad City (1997), he took on the media as journalist Dustin Hoffman breaks the story of disgruntled security guard John Travolta taking a museum hostage, complete with live Larry King interview. And in Amen (2005), he took on the Catholic Church, in this adaptation of Rolf Hochhuth's controverial play The Deputy, about the Vatican's silence on the Holocaust.
In his latest film The Ax (2005), suddenly unemployed José Garcia turns to murder to eliminate competitors in his job search; it was adapted from a novel by the late mystery titan Donald E. Westlake (Made in USA, The Hot Rock, etc.) The ackowledged master of the engagé political thriller, Costa-Gavras proved a dynamic president of the Cinémathèque française during his 1982-1987 tenure, championing film preservation and artistic freedom. The director's film, Eden Is West, was the closing night selection at Berlin Film Festival and was featured in the current Rendez-vous with French Cinema festival at Lincoln Center. He is married to Michele Ray-Gavras, a distinguished journalist who was captured by Vietcong and interviewed German terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, and has produced some of his films.
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