“Sacrifice” is finally here.
The latest Romain Gavras-directed gem, which veers between broad comedy, sharp social commentary and thrilling adventure (sometimes in the same scene), stars Anya Taylor-Joy as an environmentally minded terrorist who hijacks a bunch of doofuses at a fundraiser. Among them are Chris Evans’ action star and Vincent Cassel’s Musk-like tech mogul. The film, “Sacrifice,” is currently streaming on Netflix, more than a year after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival.
And maybe it makes sense that it took “Sacrifice” so long to show up in America, considering Gavras had been carrying around the idea “for a long time.”
“I’ve had almost every time I walk into an award ceremony,” Gavras said. He clarifies that he wasn’t trying to lampoon charity events (“There’s some really good charities”) but that he does remember attending an event in London and thinking, Oh, you couldn’t put this in a movie. “The fakeness was just pure madness and pure virtue signaling,” Gavras said. “It was so extreme that if you put it in a film, nobody would buy it.”
He thought about his own childhood and his Greek father (the “Z” filmmaker Costa-Gavras) and how he wasn’t allowed to watch Disney movies. Instead, he was fed the real fairy tales — “grand stories of moms eating their kids and people getting thrown in volcanoes.” Finally, the two halves of “Sacrifice” started wiggling together.
“From that cheeky, mischievous idea of like having an armed group arriving at a vanity gala, I was thinking, Okay, what would it need in order to not make it to not make it too zeitgeisty or to in our time? What if they had a set of beliefs that is mythical and is something we haven’t seen, but it is very faith-based,” Gavras said. It became clear – he would “have this performative group meeting people that have really strong faith.” “And not to say that one is better than the other. Because when you have very strong faith, it can also lead to a type of extremism and madness,” Gavras explained.
Gavras met with Will Arbery, a playwright and writer on “Succession,” and together they wrote what would become “Sacrifice.” Gavras drew on memories of shooting a music video in a Greek marble quarry (“They excavated for the Parthenon, but this in like 1000s of years ago, but they still make toilets. It’s like Gimli in ‘Lord of the Rings’ – ‘They dug too deep’”) and imagery from classic fantasy films. He said he’d love to make a big sword-and-sandal movie one day and counts “Gladiator” as one of his favorite films.
One of the big surprises of “Sacrifice” comes in the opening credits, when you see that the luxury brand Gucci is one of the film’s co-producers. This becomes especially striking as you watch the movie, which mercilessly skewers the ultra-wealthy.
“Sacrifice,” Gavras explained, was produced independently. “It looks big but it’s a small film. You get money where you can,” Gavras said. Gucci had read – and liked – the script and offered to help cover the production costs. Gavras said he liked the “multiverse idea” where Gucci is helping out on a movie that is also poking fun at people who wear Gucci. It’s Salma Hayek, he said, who “is playing someone that’s not her at all, but is adjacent. With Chris, it’s the same. I think there’s something interesting to play on all those elements. To have Gucci as a partner, I think is interesting, and it tells that story in a meta way.”
Gavras, who also wrote and directed the genuinely incredible “The World Is Yours” (about a small-time French hood who dreams of selling ice cream novelties in Africa) and “Athena” (a muscular, politically acute action movie about a riot that breaks out in a French housing development), said he is keenly aware that “Hollywood has been interested in what it does best – dragging European directors or South American directors and making them do Marvel movies.”
He wasn’t interested in following the same path, but he knew he had a certain amount of heat coming off “Athena” that he could cash in.
“I knew I had the moment where it’s like, Okay, are you going to do a big Hollywood movie? Or are you going to try to wrangle the clout or whatever that you have at that time and make this weird–s fucking movie that you want to make?” Gavras said. He chose the latter. Or, as he said: “I had a moment where people were excited about working with me, and instead of you know shooting a superhero movie, I was like, Why not throw a superhero in a volcano?” (And, yes, he was offered a ton of big studio projects that he refused to name.)
It wasn’t money that brought the actors to “Sacrifice,” since he said that it was made for nothing and that the production was difficult, with the team “shooting in Greece in real locations like a river in Bulgaria or in a half-active volcano.” Still, everyone was game. “Sacrifice,” as he saw it, was something of an antidote to the kind of things these actors were typically doing. “I think it’s fun for actors that are used to green screens and it almost like a day job to come on an adventure with like a director that says, Let’s make something that we haven’t seen before.”
Tonally, “Sacrifice” required a fine line to walk – something that he worked on from the script stage through the edit. He found this freeing after “Athena,” which was both technically and thematically a straight line, composed of long, unbroken shots and an all-killer, no-filler approach.
“I like the idea of encapsulating in one frame, something that can be absurd, violent, funny, petty, beautiful. Maneuvering that tone where the film starts, where you think like, Oh, it’s a satire, and then you get taken on this ride where it’s rug pull after rug pull, and then you basically go into ‘Lord of the Rings,’” said Gavras. “It’s it’s the type of film where you have to see it as a roller coaster, where you go in open and go on this ride and accept the voice or not.”
Part of what grounds “Sacrifice” are the earnest performances, particularly of Evans, who plays a parallel universe version of himself – an action star so used to playing bulletproof heroes that he can’t wrangle with the tragedy in his own life. “I think he’s very sweet and I think this is why he’s brilliant. You could hate him really easily, but he brings a sweetness that I think has heart,” said Gavras. There’s a great moment towards the start of the film where Evans is on his way to this environmentally minded gala and he’s showing up in an old limo. He feels so guilty and is so worried about how that might look that he gets out and walks to the gala.
But why did it take “Sacrifice” so long to come out?
According to Gavras, it was business as usual for an independent movie.
“That’s the hard part of making independent movies is that you have those territories that are being bought and then to make a deal between the territories and between the streamer for the U.S. It’s complex and part of me is really proud to do indie movies but like part of me is like, Oh my god this is so tiring, because it’s a hard market,” Gavras said. Not that he made it easy on himself. “I think the film also sits in a weird place where it looks like a massive movie, but it’s an indie movie. I think it’s partly that.”
If Gavras had made it with a studio partner, he said, it would have been much easier “but because we pre-sold to a lot of territories, everything becomes a puzzle. That’s just the nature of the way we built the movie to make it happen.”
Netflix eventually emerged as the frontrunner for domestic distribution because of their relationship with Gavras (“Athena” is a Netflix movie and “The World Is Yours” streamed on the service for many years). “It just made sense at some point for the U.S. to go with them,” Gavras said with a shrug. He’s a little disappointed that the movie isn’t being released in theaters in America (something critic and noted Gavras-head Bilge Ebiri pointed out), especially since he said, “we shot this movie for Imax.” Not that he’s that disappointed. He notes that you can also see it in a theater in Europe or South America.
“There is something democratic for me where you enter every home, especially with a movie like this, where people are seeing like mega-stars and they’re going to think like, Oh, I’m going to watch an action movie, and then they like, What is this? I like that,” said Gavras.
As for what’s next, Gavras doesn’t know. He dreams of being sent a script by a big studio that is note perfect. But it hasn’t happened yet. It might never happen. That’s okay. He’s got sh-t to do. He’s making music with his band GENER8ION and he usually directs the music videos. (A recent project with Yung Lean was nominated for four MTV Video Music Awards and they did an incredible performance at the show.) And he’s still thinking about that sword-and-sandal movie.
“I think I’m still a little bit young and connected. Like I think in five or ten years I won’t understand the world. I will understand the world like an old man. I still have 10 years before I do a period thing. But because of my Greek heritage, I am always dreaming about sword and sandals,” said Gavras.
Hey, after throwing movie stars into a volcano, a sword-and-sandal movie should be a breeze.
“Sacrifice” is on Netflix now.