"Cinema should disturb the dinner."
The French-Greek filmmaker, fresh off the polarising reception of Sacrifice*, on satire, spectacle, and the heist film he's writing about the Louvre.*
Romain Gavras is in Paris, between cuts, between flights, between — as he puts it with a kind of cheerful French shrug — "doing the press and trying to remember why I make films in the first place."
His third feature, Sacrifice, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. It is, by design, an event: Chris Evans as a washed-up movie star, Anya Taylor-Joy as a cult leader, Salma Hayek and Vincent Cassel as billionaire eco-philanthropists, a volcano, an interpretive dance battle, a neon sign reading Make Earth Cool Again. Critics split, hard. Some called it audacious. Others called it the worst-reviewed film of the festival. Gavras, by his own report, is unbothered.
"If everybody agrees on a film, the film is doing something wrong," he says. "I've been making things that divide people since I was nineteen years old. The Justice video. The M.I.A. video. Athena. I think it's actually the only barometer I trust. If a screening ends and the room is polite, I get worried."
He is the son of Costa-Gavras, the legendary political filmmaker behind Z and Missing, and was raised in Paris in the orbit of Kourtrajmé, the collective he co-founded with Kim Chapiron in the mid-90s. He is forty-four now, and the lineage shows up in his answers — he talks about iconography, about the visual grammar of revolt, about the way a riot becomes a painting in the moment you start staging it.
"My education is the French Revolution and the Trojan War," he says. "Those are the two libraries I keep going back to. Athena was a Greek tragedy in a French banlieue. Sacrifice is — I mean, the title alone — it's a Greek tragedy in a Greek setting, with American movie stars, made to feel like a hallucination. I'm not subtle about it."
He laughs about the reviews. "Look. I made a film with a volcano, a cult, Charli XCX, and John Malkovich. Did I think the New York Times was going to call it the most refined work of the year? No. I made the film I wanted to see in the cinema. Some people sat in that cinema and they had a great time. Some of them wanted to throw their popcorn at the screen. Both reactions are part of the same job."
What's striking, talking to him, is how clearly he separates his work from its reception. He insists he doesn't read reviews until weeks after a release. He has been working in music videos long enough — Justice's "Stress," M.I.A.'s "Born Free," "No Church in the Wild" with Jay-Z and Kanye, Jamie xx's "Gosh," and most recently a new piece with GENER8ION and Yung Lean — to know that controversy is a kind of weather, not a verdict.
"With Born Free I had people in newspapers demanding the video be banned. Fourteen years later it's in film school syllabi. I'm not saying Sacrifice is the same — every film has its own life — but the lesson is: don't argue with the first week. The first week is noise."
He is already deep in his next project. In May, Flammarion will publish a book-length investigation into the October 2025 jewel heist at the Louvre, written by three French journalists. Gavras has acquired the rights and is co-writing the adaptation now. "It will be made in France, in French. After spending two years making something in English with American stars, I want to come home for a bit. The Louvre is — I mean, it's everything. It's the institution. To make a film about the people who walked in and took the crown jewels — that's a story you only get once."
He talks about pacing, about the difference between music-video time and feature time, about how he's trying to learn restraint. "I'm aware that my reputation is for excess. I love excess. But I also think the next ten years for me are about discovering what happens when you take the foot off the gas, just slightly. Not the absence of spectacle. The intelligence of spectacle. There's a difference."
I ask him what he wants people to take from Sacrifice when it lands on Netflix this summer. He thinks for a long moment.
"I want them to be a bit annoyed. A bit moved. A bit guilty about being entertained. If a film just slides off you, what was it for? Cinema should disturb the dinner. Otherwise, you can stay home."