Striving to make something beautiful, a Cypriot director who has recently finished his third film tells THEO PANAYIDES why the world he reflects is so violent
Almost all the people I Profile are people I meet for the first time, but I’ve actually met Yiannis Economides before – at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006 where his film Soul Kicking screened in Critics’ Week, making him the first Cypriot-born director to play Cannes since Michael Cacoyannis in the 70s. A day or two earlier, I’d seen the film itself – a chastening experience, because even the urbane (and mostly middle-aged) Cannes audience proved unable to handle the naked aggression and relentlessly unpleasant characters. “Do these Greeks think that women are inferior?” one old lady fumed at her companions.
That lady was right, replies Yiannis when I tell him the story. The characters in Soul Kicking are indeed misogynist – which doesn’t mean that the film is: “I’m poking fun at these protagonists”. This time we meet in Nicosia, in the noisy foyer of the Pantheon Art Cinema where his new movie Knifer is opening the Cyprus Film Days festival. I’ve already seen him introduce the film, telling the audience that the title is ironic and “the film has a sense of humour”. The tag-line stares down from a poster on the wall, daring you to think it’s being sarcastic: “Let’s Create Something Beautiful”.
The audience may have felt a bit unnerved, because Yiannis is a striking presence – a tall 43-year-old with close-cropped hair, dressed entirely in black. He tends to look like he’s glowering at you, an impression reinforced by the shape of his face and prominent Roman nose. “He could be a gangster,” I wrote after meeting him in ’06, “or a painter of frescoes, or the kind of grumpy monk who thinks the monastery’s taking in too many visitors”. He recently played a small role in Wasted Youth (the director is a friend, he explains), a Greek film that opened the Rotterdam Festival. What did he play? “A cop!” he admits, and laughs heartily. “I always play cops, pimps, that kind of thing. What can you do?”
It bears repeating that his films are controversial. Yiannis almost got in a fist-fight with an audience member at an open-air screening of Soul Kicking in Athens, an older man – “a conservative,” he sniffs – who loudly disapproved of the film’s grim worldview, drawing the ire of its director (a couple of students in the audience leapt to its defence, he adds with satisfaction). The Greek Society of Film Critics, on the other hand, named Soul Kicking the Best Greek Film of the year just as they’d done with its predecessor, Yiannis’ explosive debut Matchbox (2002). The fact that he himself looks gruff – and potentially violent – doubtless fuels the controversy and adds to the mystique. He’s the Angry Man of Greek cinema, a national niche that’s currently more fashionable than it’s been in years: Karlovy Vary, one of Europe’s biggest film festivals, has announced a “Young Greeks” retrospective in July, including the likes of Dogtooth, Attenberg and Strella.
That’s one thing that’s changed since our last meeting in 2006. The other, of course, is that Greece – the country where Yiannis has lived for decades – is on the brink of bankruptcy. That’s real enough, he confirms: you can see it everywhere, “shops closing, businesses closing, unemployment. People walk with their heads bowed”. Crime and violence are up, banks don’t give loans, salaries are being cut, people have no money. It is, incontrovertibly, “a country in crisis”. Everything else I’ve mentioned, however, isn’t quite as simple as it looks – including the revival of Greek cinema, and very much including Yiannis’ own Angry Man persona.
Is there now a film community in Athens? Is there a Greek New Wave? He shrugs: “OK, there’s a generation of people who do things, who communicate. But I can’t say we hang out together, or that there’s a movement. Because ideologically we’re very different.” Artistic movements of the past “had a certain point of view behind them – about the world, about power, about Cinema. Yes, there’s a generation who want to make movies, who are fired up about making movies. But there’s no common philosophy.”
The word ‘generation’ is crucial, I suspect. Yiannis is a few years older than most of today’s young wannabes – enough to mean, for instance, that he didn’t grow up with MTV, let alone the multiplex revolution. The word ‘philosophy’ is also important. He may look like a thug (or an Angry Man) but Yiannis Economides is in fact an intellectual – not just quoting Dostoyevsky and 17th-century mystic Angelus Silesius, but also living his life according to a strong, implicitly left-wing ideology that’s rare nowadays.
Almost uniquely among Greek and Cypriot film directors, he doesn’t make ends meet by doing adverts or TV serials. “I have an ideological problem with advertising,” he explains, looking more like a monk than ever. “It may seem old-fashioned and naïve, but I’m an ideologue. I don’t like doing adverts, because I think that adverts sell shit. How can I make films which speak about the truth and at the same time work in advertising, which sells shit to people? To my simple mind – ‘simple’ in quotation marks – something doesn’t fit there”. It’s not just empty talk, either. It takes three or four years to make a film, so money is a real issue (and directing adverts, especially for someone with his reputation, would bring in a lot of money). He does seminars on acting and directing, which brings in some cash, but admits that “my lifestyle is a bit Spartan… I live on the razor’s edge, as they say.”
What is that lifestyle? He shrugs again: “I’m a simple man with simple pleasures. Friends, eating out, a good movie, the theatre, stuff like that”. Theatre is important: it’s where he spots many of the actors whom he later casts in his work. And what about movies? What are the films that inspired him to become a director? He names a few – John Huston’s Fat City (1972), Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (1963) – and I’m quite surprised: these aren’t the flashy cult movies you’d expect from a young(ish) director, these are classical humanist works. Not much like your own films, I observe, and he bristles indignantly: “They’re not humanistic? Of course they’re humanistic!”
Well, I venture – thinking of the hate-filled, foul-mouthed wretches who people the Economides universe – you do have a rather unusual slant on human nature. Viewers don’t always recognise these creatures as real people.
Some don’t, he shrugs. “There are others who recognise them, and very well too.”
Does he himself have experience of such people?
He nods. “OK, this is slightly personal – but yes, if I recreate them, that means I’ve walked in these neighbourhoods myself.”
As an observer?
“Yes,” he nods again. “I don’t do personal psychodramas.”
Maybe not, but he did go through a ‘lost’ phase, culminating just before Matchbox when he seriously considered giving up on films. Born and raised in Limassol, the son of a dentist who’s also an accomplished artist, Yiannis did two years of Law before dropping out – “It was a mistake all along,” he says now – then found himself, at 32, with no career to speak of and a couple of shorts to his name. “I made a film which I had to make, so I could see for myself what I could do,” he says of Matchbox. If it hadn’t worked out, he’d have quit. And done what? “Opened a wine shop and sold drinks,” he replies. “I might do that anyway.”
Oddly enough, I can easily imagine Yiannis – despite his gruff appearance – as a wine-shop owner. Granted, he might punch out the occasional complaining yuppie, but he’s a lot more gregarious than he looks. Friends cluster round to say hello as we sit in the foyer of the Pantheon, and he seems to be loving every minute – which may be due to being in Cyprus, for which he obviously has a soft spot (what was his childhood like? “Chilled-out,” he replies with a blissful smile, “like all Cypriot childhoods), but is more likely down to the simple fact that he likes people. Consider, for instance, that he likes to rehearse with his actors for five or six months before each movie – an unusually long time, much longer than he spends with his technicians (for most directors, especially the geeky Spielberg types, it’s the other way round). He also comes across as an old-school lefty who venerates the Common Man as reflexively as he hates Authority. Who does he identify with? What kind of people? “With the humble and despised,” he replies, quoting Dostoyevsky.
Is he easy or difficult to get along with? “Easy-difficult,” replies Yiannis, grinning wolfishly. He’s hard to figure out, which is part of his charm. I suspect he’s always felt like a bit of an outsider, which is why he’s drawn to heroes on the fringes of society (and why he hesitates to align himself with a Greek New Wave); maybe it’s part of being a Cypriot in Greece, though he’s lost his Cypriot accent and peppers his conversation with Greek slang to the point of sounding almost self-conscious. (I’m reminded of director Billy Wilder, who went to Hollywood from Vienna and deliberately set about immersing himself in the slang of his adopted country.) He shuns fashion, likes an ouzo at lunchtime, and looks forward to his next film – whenever that may be, in the current climate.
What’s the deal with his films, anyway? Do they have to be so nasty? “Today, some people [in Greece] say ‘Economides was right’,” he points out. “Now that things have gone off the rails, I get people telling me – people who were shocked by my first two films – they say: ‘We see it now, how right you were all along’.” Greek society has always been like this, he insists brusquely. It’s just that now “the veils are coming off”.
But it’s not just about Greek society. His greatest hope, says Yiannis, is that his work will still be relevant long after current events play out – indeed, long after he himself is gone. That’s the point, he says: “One man has kids, another builds a bridge, another builds a church” – and another makes movies, just to try and leave something behind. Art is inherently ennobling. Knifer is in black-and-white, except for one sequence, when its hero watches a puppet-show – when he’s touched by the power of Art, and the film bursts into colour.
The rest is almost irrelevant. “My life is simple, I don’t have much to say,” shrugs Yiannis Economides, as his new film draws to a close inside the theatre. “There are no designer labels on my clothes, I’ve avoided that for years now. I’m a low-profile person”. Besides, “that’s what I’m trying to attack through my films – pomposity, the Establishment, exhibitionists – so I can’t go out and be strutting like a peacock. But I don’t like it anyway.
“Basically, I’m still a peasant,” he concludes. “And a bit of a punk.” From inside comes the sound of applause. The film is over; Yiannis gets up and takes a breath, getting ready for the Q&A. Another audience taken on a journey through his strange, disturbing cinematic psyche. Let’s create something beautiful.
