Famous film director Costas Gavras plans to bring the book of Yanis Varoufakis’ “Adults in the Room” to the big screen. Gavras who is famous for his political films said in a letter to the former finance minister that he felt inspired to turn the book into a film as he found himself “often angered, indeed enraged, by the violence and the indifference of Eurogroup members, especially the German side, to the drama and unsustainable situation in which the people of Greece lived, and live.”
Costas Gavras is known for films on controversial political issues. Law and justice, oppression, legal/illegal violence, and torture are common subjects in his work, especially relevant to his earlier films. Costa-Gavras is an expert of the “statement” picture. In most cases, the targets of Costa-Gavras’s work have been right-of-center movements and regimes, including Greek conservatives in and out of the military in Z, and right-wing dictatorships that ruled much of Latin America during the height of the Cold War, as in State of Siege and Missing. he has been living in France for the last decades.
Yanis Varoufakis posted Gavras’ letter on his website.
Costa Gavras, whose films shaped the conscience of the internationalist struggle for democracy everywhere, yesterday issued the following statement – in the context of the launch of the Greek edition of my Adults in the Room. Needless to say I am chuffed and deeply grateful.
When the crisis began, the tragedy that the Greek people are still living through, I began to gather material and information in an attempt to make sense of the reasons and the people – published, filmic and oral. However, what I was missing were the goings on behind the closed doors, where the representatives of the European Union and the Greek people met.
On 16th July 2015, just after his resignation, I sent a text message to Yanis Varoufakis, whom I did not know personally. In that message I wrote: “Reading your interview in the New Statesman, I believe I found what I have been looking for a long time: the subject for a film, a piece of fiction, about a Europe governed by a group of cynical people disconnected from human, political and cultural concerns – obsessed with numbers and them alone.”
Soon, the arrangements were made and Michele, my wife, and I visited Yanis and Danae in Greece a few weeks later. Meanwhile I read two of his books, The Global Minotaur (London: Zed Books, 2011,2015) and the manuscript of a book he was completing at that time entitled And The Weak Suffer What They Must? (London: The Bodley Head, 2016). I was impressed by the quality and originality of their content, as well as the prose.
When we met we had long conversations, in the context of which he let me know that he was about to begin writing his own account of his tenure as Greece’s finance minister, a tale of being an outsider in politics, of the negotiations in the Eurogroup – that illegitimate but ultra powerful EU body. I asked to read the manuscript. He agreed and began sending it to me chapter by chapter, as the book was being written.
Immediately I was convinced by the text’s seriousness and the accuracy of the description of the behaviour of each of the tragedy’s protagonists. Reading it saddened me, and I found myself often angered, indeed enraged, by the violence and the indifference of Eurogroup members, especially the German side, to the drama and unsustainable situation in which the people of Greece lived, and live.
I decided to make a film out of this tragedy. Yanis Varoufakis gave me the rights to his book and absolute freedom to adapt it.
Costa Gavras
Monday 9th October 2017
Supposedly the script is ready… which actor should play Yanis Varoufakis?
Only one actor can really play Varoufakis in the announced Kostas Gavras film: Dwayne Johnson pic.twitter.com/C8W0tEdHNz
— Yiannis Βaboulias (@YiannisBab) October 10, 2017
As for Wolfgang Schaeuble I would propose Michael Douglas as both have a negative aura, imho.
The cast will be a difficult choice, as the protagonists of the famous Greek Drama were and still are more than a film budget can absorb.
For the role of Angela Merkel, I would propose Christina Ricci in a blondier version.
Naomi Watch as Chrisitne Lagarde… as for the rest Juncker, Dijsselbloem & Co I would hire only one actor because they are all the same.
