12 Quotes by Costa-Gavras

We don’t live in Disneyland. We live in blood and in time, not in Fantasyland. We live in a tragic world.

I saw money becoming more and more important everywhere. It’s one of the most abstract and important inventions by human beings. At the same time, money is capable of extraordinary corruption in every kind of relationship. I tried to see how and why, more and more, money is becoming a religion.

Technology is an extension of our hands and our feet, not our spirit.

You know every time you change a decade, it’s a problem, because you approach the end little by little. But my decision is to keep going. The problem is always to know when the head doesn’t work well. Someone has to tell you. I hope my children will tell me.

The American influence is not so aggressive anymore. The American big business influence in Latin America is not as strong, so people can vote and they can have a different life than before. They can have more liberal, more interesting, and more democratic governments.

Essentially, filmmakers have to be free and not directed by power or politicians.

Aggressive capitalism leads the world, and we can see the results, especially in Europe: more poverty for the vast majority, and more riches for a few.

I decided to go to the cinema school because I thought it was a new sort of media. Nowadays, it’s not anymore, but in the ’50s, cinema had a half century of age. Today it’s more than one century. I thought it was a new media, a new way of telling stories.

Many years ago making movies was something. It was the major entertainment just to go to the cinema, once, twice a week. At the time, something like 400 million people went to the movies.