French filmmaker Romain Gavras is best known to the screen-watching world thanks to his arresting and visually ambitious music videos, which have included Jamie xx’s “Gosh,” Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild” and M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls,” among various others. But that could change when his third feature film, Athena, releases on Netflix on Sept. 23 after its world premiere this week in Venice.
The film arrives as if the perfect vehicle for Gavras background and ambitions. The youngest son of Oscar-winning Greek director, Costa-Gavras, and French political journalist and film producer, Michèle Ray-Gavras, Romain Gavras grew up steeped in the Greek classics and politically informed art and activism. In 1995, he co-founded the film collective Kourtrajmé with his childhood friends Kim Chapiron and Ladj Ly (director of the Oscar-nominated Les Misérables), and his second feature, The World Is Yours, debuted to warm reviews in the Directors’ Fortnight section of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
Athena marks Gavras step up into the main competition of a top-tier festival. The story of four brothers at the heart of an explosive protest in a Paris housing estate after the apparent racially motivated murder of a young boy at the hands of police, the film marries the visual poetry of Gavras’ commercial and music video work with a kinetic and immersive mode of action filmmaking, echoing elements of classic Greek tragedy while delivering a scathing condemnation of our divisive moment.
The Hollywood Reporter connected with Gavras ahead of Venice to discuss how he achieved Athena‘s stunning 15-minute opening sequence and his intentions behind the film’s ending. (There is a spoiler in the final question and answer.)
What were the creative origins and inspiration for the film? Where did it begin?
So, Ladj Ly and I are childhood friends and we created a film collective called Kourtrajmé with Kim Chapiron about 20 years ago, and we’ve always been helping each other and collaborating since then. And a couple of years ago, we all started to bounce around ideas for the premise of what Athena became: The idea of being inside the sparkle of what could become the first blaze that would spread through a country like a donation. Because I’ve always been influenced from my origins by Greek tragedy — you know, Greek tragedy was like the bedtime stories in my family —we very quickly decided that we needed those formal qualities of storytelling, which is unity of time and unity of location, and lot of hints and symbolic power to the images. So it kind of came from the collision of both our worlds, I guess.
So, for viewers like myself who might not know Paris especially well, was Athena loosely based on a real place? Is that a community that you personally know well? And if not, how did you immerse yourself in it?
It’s not a real estate. We called it Athena just because we wanted to pull the thread of Greek tragedy, and of course, Athena is the goddess of war and wisdom. So it’s not a real neighborhood, and it’s not based on a real story. It was based on a lot of stories. This riot hasn’t happened yet, but it’s almost like it’s the riot that could happen. We wanted to imagine what could be the sparkle that could really ignite the whole country, and be in it almost like a pre-civil war first battle. Because there’s a lot of tension everywhere in the world, but also in Paris. And we feel like everyone’s kind of pushing towards that. And we know from history that civil wars are the worst thing that can happen to society. When you look at the Greek civil war, it’s something that men in my family have known — it’s like grandfather against grandfather; cousin against cousin. It’s the worst because it’s within the family. This is why we took the intimacy of a family getting torn apart, where their torment spills across the neighborhood and then across the country.
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But to go back to your question, I could say the film, just because it has a lot of symbolism and a lot of what the Greek tragedy brings, it’s almost like a notch above reality. On our stage of the estate, we built turrets to make it look more like a castle, almost like if you were in Ran from Kurosawa. So everything is a little bit heightened, because we needed the symbolic power of timelessness to it. You know, like it’s something that could happen now, or that could have happened during the Trojan War. Every war almost has the same kind of template — it comes from intimacy, it comes from an original lie, and then it spreads through a country.
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