Kevin Lally on Film

The great Greek-French filmmaker Constantin Costa-Gavras turned 90 on February 12, 2023. Best known for his Oscar-winning 1969 classic Z, the director seldom made a film that wasn’t fueled by political urgency. That certainly applies to the movie that was the subject of our 1988 conversation, Betrayed. His third English-language film, it stars Debra Winger as an FBI agent who falls for the murder suspect she’s investigating, then discovers he’s the leader of a band of Nebraska racists. I recall having issues with the film, as I do with most screenplays by Joe Eszterhas of Basic Instinct fame, but the subject matter remains shockingly timely.

The dark side of America has surfaced before in the politically outspoken films of Greek-born, French-based director Constantin Costa-Gavras. In 1973’s State of Siege, he scorned the U.S. training of torture squads in Uruguay; in 1982’s Oscar-nominated Missing, he pointed to U.S. complicity in the fall of Chilean president Salvador Allende.

But Betrayed finds Costa-Gavras deep in the American heartland, exploring one of this country’s timeliest and most troubling issues—the resurgence of racist violence. Debra Winger plays an FBI agent who goes undercover to investigate a Nebraska farmer (Tom Berenger) suspected of the murder of an unabashedly liberal Chicago radio personality (loosely based on the 1984 killing of Denver talk-show host Alan Berg). Convinced of the man’s innocence, the agent falls in love with the farmer. Only then does he trust her enough to introduce her to his hidden world of white supremacist rhetoric and sadistic manhunts. The Irwin Winkler production, written by Joe Eszterhas (Jagged Edge), also stars John Heard as Winger’s hard-bitten FBI superior.

Arriving in New York in the midst of an oppressive heat wave, Costa-Gavras nonetheless appears spruce as he discusses his sure-to-be-controversial new film. “I don’t think my characters can be considered white supremacists or Aryans,” he contends, though Berenger’s character clearly fits the definition. “Those groups are a problem in the United States—they live inside every society—but they are not the problem. The danger comes when those groups are extended by other people whom we call ‘normal’ people. You see them in the streets of small towns, big towns, but underneath they’re hiding feelings of violence and racism. It’s the old cowboy myth about a clean society—no blacks, no Jews, no homosexualists, no gypsies, all the ‘dirty’ parts of society. It’s a cowboy ethic, but it’s also a Christian ethic—the idea of having a kind of paradise where everybody’s nice, blond, blue-eyed. The ones who took this philosophy to the highest level were the Nazis, and we discovered where that can lead—to the camps, to extermination, to no respect for another’s dignity. The danger, as I said, is when that philosophy is extended and wins the feelings of good people. All they need is to have a leader.”

Pre-production began two years ago on Betrayed, and since then Costa-Gavras has observed with the rest of America such incidents as the death of black youngster Michael Griffith while pursued by a gang of whites in Howard Beach, New York, and the rise in racial tensions on college campuses. “We have the same thing in France with the Africans and the Arabs,” he says. “It’s not only your problem, it’s a much larger problem. The Western world is coming back very strongly to its old obsessions, it’s old racism.”

Does the director expect any resentment from American audiences that he, as a European, is shedding light on one of this country’s uglier social dilemmas? “Some people can say that, but it would be a bit naive because the writer is American, the actors are American, the people who came to me saying ‘Do it’ are all Americans. It would be ignoring the real problem and trying to find a side escape, and not to speak about what’s going on in the story. After all, Fritz Lang years ago made one of the best movies on lynching, Fury. In the American cinema you’ll find a lot of foreign directors who came here and did that kind of subject.”

The 55-year-old filmmaker admits that Betrayed’s Midwestern setting—it was actually filmed largely in Ontario, Canada—did require some extra research on his part. “My assistants found me cassettes with different accents—I had to hear them again and again to be able to recognize this accent from that one. I cannot say I can do it very easily, because the differences are so small. I gave those cassettes to the actors also, because I wanted them to speak with just a trace of an accent. Then I traveled around for weeks and weeks and I drank a lot of beer—which I don’t like very much, but that’s the only thing to drink. I made visits to farms and I took thousands of photos. It was an extraordinary experience, because I was able to see how people were living and sometimes how they were thinking. And very nice people sometimes say things like: ‘Oh, we don’t have any blacks’ or ‘any colored living here. We are lucky, it’s not like New York.’ There is a hidden racism in that ‘We are lucky.’ Why are you more lucky than New York? This is the base of racism. It’s a sickness we all have somewhere in there. Some people fight it and some people don’t.”

Costa-Gavras says he deliberately played up the attractive side of Tom Berenger’s bigoted character, Gary Simmons. “I was a little bit fed up in the movies to see bad guys who are bad all the way down—their dogs are bad, their kids are bad, even their car is a bad car. This is a very fake way of presenting things. Of course, it’s very comfortable for the audience, because you’re on the nice side immediately. It’s not disturbing, there’s no identification. I would like the audience to identify themselves and to learn with Gary, because he’s handsome and he’s nice. And then the audience discovers a monster.”

The director notes that his heroine, Cathy Weaver, is also imperfect. Inexperienced in the field, she is “just one of a hundred agents on the case… A professional would never start a sentimental relationship with someone she didn’t know well enough. But he looked so good, with such a nice family—who’d believe that he could be such a bad guy?”

Costa-Gavras praises Winger’s ability to grasp such an emotionally complex role, though he admits some initial concern about her reputation as a “difficult” performer. “I heard so many things about Debra, people saying, ‘Oh, you’re working with Debra—God! It’s gonna be tough!’ But we had discussions, as I like to have before shooting starts, to explain the character and to hear what they think also. Debra is definitely an actor with ideas. Once we knew what the other was thinking about the movie, the relationship became very simple and very good. She wasn’t difficult with us… Debra has a very precise vision of what she’s doing and what she thinks should be. She hates weakness, she hates when the director or the crew don’t know exactly what they have to do. I understand that.”

One might also expect some fireworks between the controversy-prone Costa-Gavras and the usually reticent American studio system, but so far that hasn’t been the case. “I hear so many stories from colleagues of mine about being exhausted and harassed by the film companies, so I’m surprised,” he says. “That must be true, but I’ve had great experiences.”

Born in Athens, Costa-Gavras left Greece at the age of 19 and settled in Paris. He studied at the Institute des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques and became an assistant to such renowned French directors as René Clair, Yves Allegret, René Clement and Jacques Demy. His debut film, the detective thriller The Sleeping Car Murders (1965), was well-received, but the director’s big breakthrough came in 1969 with Z, the gripping true story of the assassination of a Greek parliament member. The first film to receive Oscar nominations for best picture and best foreign-language film, Z won the latter prize along with the New York Film Critics award for best picture. Yves Montand, the star of The Sleeping Car Murders and Z, returned to play the demanding lead role in The Confession (1970), a harrowing dramatization of Czech deputy foreign minister Artur London’s trial for treason in 1952, and State of Siege, an exposé of political torture in Uruguay.

Costa-Gavras made his American debut with Missing, which starred Oscar nominees Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek as the father and wife of a young American abducted during a South American military coup. Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart won an Oscar for their poignant and angry screenplay, with Costa-Gavras earning his first directing nomination since Z.

Costa-Gavras is currently developing potential film projects in both France and the United States, but says he will only do an American film “if the subject interests me and gives me some sort of special passion and has a universal meaning. If it’s really only American, I don’t know. It has to touch me. Every director has three or four preoccupations in his mind and does movies in that direction. Of course, I’d like to have some fun sometime. It’s a dream to make a musical or a comedy—I tried one in France and I’ll try again sometime. But those are pipe dreams, childish dreams.”

Asked if any future American projects would have to include some political dimension, he replies, “Not really. I was talking to Debra yesterday and I told her I’d like to do another movie with her, just about life. But life is political, whatever you say.”

How does Costa-Gavras achieve the balance between meaningful work and commercial success that characterizes his best-known films? “I’m the first viewer of my movie, and I like movies. So if I’m doing movies the way I like to see them, other people will like to see them. But every subject has its own character and its own necessities. Betrayed couldn’t have been made like Missing, and Missing couldn’t have been made like Z. Every movie has its own style, like a human being. It is the way it is and you have to respect that. You cannot manipulate it.

“Cocteau used to say about commercial movies, ‘There are rules for success, but nobody knows them.’”

Betrayed is available to stream on Cinemax On Demand.