To the letter

Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.

The crowd gathers outside the widow’s hotel window, carrying signs and shouting angry slogans. Her husband, a foreign politician and popular figure in leftist-pacifist circles, has been fatally assaulted after delivering a speech; he will die on the operating table several hours later. A van of police goons breaks up the demonstration, but not before several protesters with cans of white paint leave their mark on the street: a giant Z.  

Though this graffiti is the first appearance of the letter that gives a name to Greek director Costa-Gavras’s incendiary 1969 film (as well as Vasilis Vasilikos’s novel, the movie’s source material), viewers familiar with Europe’s tumultuous political landscape during the 1960s would’ve recognized the reference. Z is a shorthand for Zei—rough translation: “He lives!”—which had been spray-painted around Athens after the murder of martyr Gregoris Lambrakis, the inspiration behind the doomed icon played by Yves Montand (referred to only as “the Deputy”). You don’t need to be versed in the era’s dictatorships and skullduggery, however, to appreciate what the filmmaker and his collaborators pulled off—a tightly paced conspiracy thriller that, as the Film Forum’s 40th-anniversary revival confirms, continues to feel revolutionary.  

 “The military had just taken over my country,” Costa-Gavras, 76, says, calling from his home in France. He’s referring to the 1967 coup that put extremist right-wing leader George Papadopoulos in power. “I wanted to make a statement of protest. But rather than sign a petition, or take to the streets yelling, ‘Down with the Colonists!,’ I decided I would protest with a movie. I’d already read Vasilikos’s book, so I thought, This is my way of saying no.”

To declare that you will express dissent with an adaptation of a controversial novel is one thing. As Costa-Gavras found out, securing funding for such an ambitious hot-button project proved to be more arduous than he’d imagined. “Surprisingly, people didn’t want to give us money to make a movie about a Greek senator who’d been killed by the government,” the director says, chuckling. “Everyone kept telling me, ‘There’s no love story. You have all these characters—the magistrate, the reporter, the politician, the two assassins—but there’s no lead role. This is the opposite of what the movies are about!’ I had a French crew, but we couldn’t afford to shoot in France; luckily, Algeria’s minister of culture invited us to film there with free rein.” The irony of making a movie about suppressing prodemocracy forces in a country still reeling from a battle for independence—a war against the Gallic crew’s fellow nationalists, no less—wasn’t lost on the auteur. Still, he says a spirit of détente between the sides prevailed. “Everyone was willing to put aside the past and focus on what we were trying to do. Even Raoul Coutard, who’d had a reputation as being extremely conservative, got along with everybody.”

Thank God: It’s impossible to imagine that Z would have had the impact it did without the legendary cinematographer’s creative input. The artist who defined the look of the nouvelle vague lends a sense of you-are-there urgency to the film, and despite Costa-Gavras’s long-standing claim that employing a vérité visual style was borne out of economic necessity, his collaborator quickly points out that the shoot wasn’t exactly a bare-bones affair. “The camera weighed 35 kilos!” Coutard exclaims, laughing over the phone. “It was mobile, yes, but far heavier than the handheld cameras I used with Godard on Breathless. This wasn’t war photography; we were making a film, with a full production crew. I remember that Costa-Gavras wasn’t particularly happy with the early footage, but I managed to reassure him: ‘Don’t worry, it will turn out fine.’ I was right.”

The combination of the raw, guerrilla look and a forward-momentum procedural narrative helped make Z a huge international success, eventually nabbing an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. How it will play 40 years later, so removed from its original cultural climate, is something that Costa-Gavras is eager to discover. (Our own critic, for one, has mixed feelings about the movie; see page 68.) “I’m very curious to see how an American audience will react to it now,” the director says. “It was certainly a product of the times, though the idea was never that Z was only about the Lambrakis case. I wanted to show people that these kinds of tragedies don’t just happen in Greece; they can happen anywhere, at any time.” He pauses for a second. “And I’m not so sure our world is any less dangerous now than it was then.”    

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