Hello, my name is Justin Declue and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club. And today, we are tackling the political thriller

and the works of Costa Gavris. Any resemblance to actual events to persons living or dead in this

podcast is not accidental. It's intended. Wow, we're starting with the bang for a filmmaker that you mention his name and people go Zed. That's it. That's it. That's it. I say Mad City. Oh, yeah. We love Mad City. Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta, together at last. Yeah. But, like, I was fascinated going through his filmography and knowing, like, how powerful that one movie is, Mad City, of course, like, why people don't talk about him more. Now, he has a mainstay on, like, Criterion. Like, if films come out, you see, like, State of Siege is released on disc, missing is released on disc. But I don't hear

that many Gavreth hardliners that are like, I love everything that he does, and this is why.

Yeah, I mean, this is an unscientific survey, but when you go on letterboxed, the app that I use most,

when you look at his directorial credits ranked by popularity, in the first row is a movie called Lumiere,

which is one of those like omnibus films. Yeah, that has like a hundred credits.

Like Michael Hanuket and John Borman and a million other people directed it. And you can,

you can gauge the relative popularity of a director by how high are the omnibus films ranked in their letterboxed popularity?

Had you ever been curious about the rest of its filmography?

Frankly, no. And I'm sorry to say that because I should I should have been more curious

about the rest of his filmography. Obviously, I'd seen Zed, but that's the only one I had seen.

I think I filed the rest of it away in the

Eat Your Vegetables file of my brain. But like Zed is so immediate and like passionate that I remember

when I saw that film, I went and checked out a bunch of his other films at the time. I remember

sitting in I-sort cinema working. No one was coming in. I just sat and watched Zed on the local computer and just had a blast with him. I got to see his other films. What compelled you about Costa Gavros? Because I think another thing that made me resist him or not even resist just made me not think about him was he felt like one of those filmmakers who was like frozen in amber in the 60s and 70s.

You know, he felt like somebody who, again, this is not, this is not me thinking consciously.

It's just he felt like somebody who, I guess, was not in the current conversation.

I think it's just that Zed is so energetic in the way that it presents stuff, that that is

gripping enough for me to want to explore filmography.

And what I discovered very quickly is, oh, he got rid of those notions fairly quickly in his

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