French-Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras is the director behind such legendary films as “Z,” “Missing,” and “Amen.” More recently, he made “The Capital,” starring French humorist Gad Elmaleh. In an extended interview in Democracy Now’s studio, the current chief of La Cinémathèque Française reflects on his fifty-year-long career as a political filmmaker.

When asked about his film “The Capital,” here’s what he said:

– “The money becomes a kind of religion in our society. And the ethics getting more and more weaker, and the money is getting bigger and bigger. You have more and more poor people, and more and more rich people. The middle class is shrinking.”

– Mark (the lead character, played by Elmaleh), to me, he’s just an employee in the bank, one day they push him up to the highest point. They put him up there just for a while. He decides to stay. He does everything he can to stay up there. That’s generally the story. He’s a good man at the beginning and little by little he becomes a kind of sympathetic monster– It’s based on a book written by someone who was in the banking system, and he ran away because he was very tired, and very disgusted, and he do that book, but I had to change a few things, in particular the end, because at the end the character of the book — he was punished. And I think this is not very real, what’s going on, no banker is in prison since all the problems we have with them, so at the end he keeps being an important person in the banking system.”

When asked about the future of Greece, Costa-Gavras says: “You know, a filmmaker doesn’t have solutions. He has questions, and that is all. The solutions have to be found by the politicians, from the people who we vote for, and also from the European community and others. I don’t have the solution. The problem in Greece is very complex, but it’s a big problem for the people.”

WATCH the interview here