 let's talk about the film adults in the room and I remember back in 2017 you told us the book of the same name got its title from the then head of the IMF and the current head of the european central bank because they revolved in revolving doors continued to revolve yes there was a moment when she made a statement which i thought was way up should we need adults in the room in order to reach an agreement and my purpose there is my other book was to expose how the so-called adults were behaving or misbehaving inside the rooms of power so it's a story about Greece in about Europe but i do believe that it's also a universal story about insiders misbehaving and doing things on behalf of those who put them there of their electors against the interests of the electors and in L on n and my guest is Janus Varoufakis okay let's talk more about the movie i've admired costa graveris since well z which i think is probably his towering masterpiece missing as another but he's made about a dozen very powerful films on politics he's a political director but at the same time he's a storyteller when i designed the ministry of finance in Greece a few days later of course it was a very tumultuous and difficult period we just surrendered effectively it's you know like your own government having thrown the towering i received a text message from costa gaveris whom i didn't know and he said my name is costa gaveris i'm a filmmaker you probably don't know who i am i thought yeah right i've been observing you or what you've been going through over the last five months and i want this story to be my last movie and i thought oh my god and then he described the movie he said it will be done along the lines of twelve angry men people you know men in a room which is more or less what it was if you accept christine lagarde who's the only woman there really it will be a movie about christ but it will be a universal movie about how europe that has lost its soul concentrated only on profits and banking crisis destroyed a people and this is exactly the movie that he ended up making even though he worked for four years together i was working on my book on my book and he was simultaneously writing his script over the decades he's produced his own films again and again he's managed somehow to fund them usually wildly controversy of films that were telling things that people didn't want to hear or that officials didn't want to hear on both sides of what used to be the iron curtain is that still the case does he still produce as well as direct i absolutely at this point it is incumbent upon me to mention a remarkable woman michelle rey gavras michelle is causes his wife who is the producer you should dedicate the whole program to her not to cost her to her she is a force of nature just to give an example she was obviously very striking young woman she was a model for l or for one of those french magazines and she had enough of doing that by the age of 18 and then she wanted around the world in the end becoming exceptionally politicized and left wing so she went to saigon during the vietnam war and had herself arrested by the vietcong in order to go over to the other side when she got out of that she rushed to greece after having gotten together with costa she rushed to greece to help panagullis who is one of the great resistance hero during the greek fascist dictatorship trying to help him escape from prison so this is the producer of the film costa and michelle together are a formidable deal what what a what a story but costa is a french greek is he not uh he's a greek that during the civil war saw no future for himself he's left wing village parents and so on were decimated and he like many other Greeks at the time and some famous ones escaped to the west to europe as they used to call it he ended up in france more or less accidentally and he became embedded and he's exceptionally um grateful to the way that france embraced him i remember when you told me about the the prospect of the film i thought what an extraordinary honor to have a film made about you a b to have a film made about you by by costa and c to have him see it as his last film it is um what can i say overwhelming um i'll just describe a scene to you the one of the highlights of my life when he completed the first copy of the movie he asked me to fly to paris to see it uh in order to comment before the final cut and we went to the dungeon in the house uh the russian jack they have a dungeon where they have a big screen and you know they do all the editing and stuff and there is a there was a big sofa five-seater and they sat me on my own in the middle and there were two armchairs behind me elevated one for costa and one for michelle and they were watching me watch the movie uh because i wanted to see how i would react now at that moment i thought now i think i can die once i've experienced this um the honor is so great that i can live with that honor for the rest of my days i've often been lampooned by satirists i've seen many images of myself being sent up by a long list of famous actors going back six you know forty years but uh i would find it very hard to look at a serious portrait of myself without a sense of mortification do you see yourself do you recognize yourself i do because christos lulis who played me was remarkable at the way he captured me it was very difficult to find somebody who would speak english like i do uh and greek the way i do and he caught the moment very well but philippe this is not a movie about me i'd never see it as a movie about me i don't see the book as a book about me this i'm an accidental politician i would never ever have imagined of you know a political life uh if it was not for the wholesale bankruptcy of the greek state and the greek people and it was a result of commenting on it and commenting on it and coming up with proposals of what they should be doing instead of what they were doing that led to the moment when one young man who was to be prime minister a few months later came to me and said okay time time to you know put up or shut up come and do it and i found myself in that so for me i was not the center of it it was the people who were in the center of it the people the taxi drivers you know the homeless people who were coming to me and they were saying to me philippe you know we're not asking you for anything we're finished just make sure that those who are on the edge of the precipice and are about to fall where we are don't fall