Romain Gavras: ‘I was not allowed to watch Disney as a kid. I was raised on Greek tragedy’

Around 11 thrilling, single-shot minutes into an early Venice festival screening of Athena, the film’s title appeared on screen to thunderous applause.

Fair enough.

The miraculous camera angles and high-octane action sequence — complemented by a mesmerising and star-making turn from newcomer Sami Slimane — that opens the film would alone make Athena the cinematic event of the year. What’s perhaps more remarkable is that the pace seldom lets up for almost 100 minutes. It’s quite a testament to the virtuoso skills of filmmaker Romain Gavras.

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By the time the filmmaker and his cast sat down at the press conference, everyone had the same question: how on earth did you do that?

“First, I’d like to say I didn’t have grey hair before this movie,” says Gavras. “There are some cuts, but not where you expect them. We rehearsed for two months with the actors and a small camera just to see how we would choreograph the shots. We had an almost military organisation because it’s not just the camerawork and how the extras are going to move, You have to think about how the pyrotechnics will impact. For that opening shot, it’s a mix between operators using Steadicam and then we unclip the Steadicam. And then later, it gets clipped to a drone and that takes off. So that was very difficult, but everyone was very focused. And I don’t like to use CGI or green screen or stuff like that. Even my daughter, who’s 13, she watches an Avengers movie, she’s pointing out the green screen. I think the audience actually feels it when there’s real danger.”

The furious tempo is in step with the film’s emotional pitch. Inspired by Greek tragedy, Athena concerns three brothers responding to the tragic death of their youngest sibling, who is believed to have been killed by the police. Abdel (Dali Benssalah), a military hero, is called back from the frontline to appeal for calm. His younger brother Karim (Sami Slimane), meanwhile, has amassed an army of disaffected young men on scrambler bikes to transform the housing estate of the title into a fortress. The movements of older brother Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), a drug dealer, are impeded by the siege, while the riot police move in.

“Our Paris set-up and the film’s relationship with the media and the police is drawn from actual context,” explains Gavras. “We elevated it to almost a mythological level and built it like a Greek tragedy. Greek tragedy uses a lot of symbolism and iconography. It’s higher than reality. The cops, for example, in France will never do like a Roman formation with shields like you see in our film, you know. But it’s a visual cue that gives a kind of timelessness to the conflict. The same goes with the music. We took some very iconic French rap songs but we completely translated them in an operatic and symphonic way with choirs and Greek lyrics. That was always the idea. To have something mythological that is drawn from reality.”

Athena was produced and co-written by Ladj Ly, the Cannes-winning director of another banlieue classic, 2019′s Les Misérables. Ly and Gavras have been collaborating since they were teenagers, when, partially inspired by a viewing of La Haine, they co-founded the Kourtrajmé collective with Sheitan director Kim Chapiron.

“We started doing films with video cameras when we were 14,” says Gavras. “So we’ve always helped each other out. When I shoot the film, he comes and he reads my script. But this is the first time we’ve worked together on a script.”

Everything is political. Even a Marvel movie is going to be political because it’s going to say a lot to American soft power. A Britney Spears video is political

Gavras is the son of French journalist and film producer Michèle Ray-Gavras, and the Greek-French film director Costa-Gavras, whose Oscar-winning 1969 thriller Z came to redefine what political cinema could be.

“At home, the only conversation was politics and cinema,” laughs Gavras. “I was not allowed to watch Walt Disney when I was a kid. I still don’t. I was raised listening to Greek myths or Greek tragedy. So instead of having Snow White, it was a woman eating her children, or a man killing his dad and marrying his mum.”

Athena won the Premio Arca Cinema Giovani at Venice, the prize awarded to best film as voted for by a hundred-strong jury of 18-25 year-olds around the world. Critics, additionally, have rightly responded with a great deal of enthusiasm. Sight & Sound described Athena as “the most exciting political thriller since Children of Men”. Rolling Stone’s David Fear hailed “Romain Gavras’s depiction of oppressed Parisians declaring war on the police” noting that “Athena doesn’t want to start an uprising; it is an uprising”.

Inevitably, several Twitter users who bill themselves as being concerned with the so-called “anti-white media” have pushed back against the enthusiasm with a Cancel Athena hashtag.

“I don’t see characters as sociological studies,” says Gavras. “I just see them as heroes of cinema. At the end of the day, it’s giving too much importance to cinema to think that a film could make somebody left-wing or extreme right-wing. Maybe you’ll start smoking because Marlon Brando smokes and he’s cool, but I don’t think you’re going to change your political views because of a film.”

To date, Gavras has directed three films including the Directors’ Fortnight-selected The World Is Yours (2018). His most-widely seen work, however, is the body of audacious and innovative music videos he has crafted for Jamie xx, Kanye West and MIA. The politically-charged Athena, he notes, is not such a radical departure.

“I guess it uses a lot of contemporary context and political elements,” says Gavras. “But my father has a saying that I think is very true, and it’s how I’ve been educated. Everything is political. Even a Marvel movie is going to be political because it’s going to say a lot to American soft power. A Britney Spears video is political. It’s always saying something about a certain moment in pop culture and how that influences the rest of the world. So it’s a tricky label, a political film. The line I take is: are you trying the best you can to make a good film?”

— Athena is on Netflix from September 23