Justice? What justice?

The Holocaust, a guilt-ridden SS officer and a compromised pope - Amen is far more likely to attract controversy than cinema audiences. But, as Matthew Sweet discovers, its veteran director Costa-Gavras has had enough of playing the studio game

George Steiner famously declared that the Holocaust had made tragedy impossible, but movie-makers don't read much literary criticism. With varying degrees of cynicism, directors from Jerry Lewis to Roberto Benigni to Gillian Armstrong have used depictions of the Nazi death camps as a way of persuading an audience that their work has moral weight and value. This kind of ethical legerdemain is something that Costa-Gavras, the veteran Greek auteur behind politically-inflected dramas such as Z (1969) and Missing (1982), has noted, with disgust. So when he came to make Amen, (see Anthony Quinn's review) a film whose central character is an SS hygienist assigned to the extermination programme, he was determined not to add insult to atrocity.

"The image you have in your head about those situations is so extraordinarily strong that it's very difficult to reproduce them in the cinema," he says. "I would never try. The audience will imagine what I cannot show. I suppose I could have got together some extras, and said to them: 'Go get naked, now you're going to go into this room and you're going to be gassed.' But just saying those words to you makes me feel uncomfortable, indecent."

He originally wanted to make a film of Robert Merle's Death is my Profession, a novel narrated by Rudolf Hoess, the last and most efficiently murderous commandant of Auschwitz. (The book deals with the daily problems of Hoess's job: how, for instance, does one incinerate 1,000 people in a day, when there are only facilities to despatch 500?) The director was unable to find producers willing to put their money into such a production, or an actor willing to take on such a part. Then he remembered The Representative, a play that became a cause célèbre when it was performed in Paris in 1963. A more accessible work, Rolf Hochhuth's drama related the true story of Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who risked his life to pass information about the extermination programme to the Allies, the Pope, and the German churches. It was one of the first public acknowledgments of the Vatican's dubious war record, and the right-wing press railed against it. One commentator denounced it as "a monstrous provocation designed to satisfy the hatred the Marxists have for the papacy which condemned them, and to encourage or to revive the most irrational popular racism."

Amen has its share of critics too. Since the film's premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, it has been denounced as defamatory by a small synod of prominent bishops. Most objections, however, have been to the poster – designed by Oliviero Toscani, the originator of Benetton's notorious shock ads – which depicts a swastika superimposed upon a Christian cross.

"In society there are two important things," reflects Costa-Gavras. "Justice and religion. Both of them are supposed to have no direct interests. No money interests. No power interests. So they should be the first ones to point the finger at a problem. But they don't. Sometimes dogma can seem more important than human happiness and human life. In the 1930s, the silence of the church paved the way for the Nazis to achieve power. In 1936, nobody boycotted the Olympic Games. In 1938, only one religious leader condemned Kristallnacht. If the church had protested at an early stage, I don't think that Hitler would have been able to carry out his programme of extermination. Now the Pope goes to Africa and says, don't make love, don't use condoms. It's completely unrealistic. Insane. So this kind of problem: one relating to our dogmatic fixations, our indifferences, our silences, is still here."

Amen treats a theme that has haunted all 45 years of Costa-Gavras's film-making career: what happens to individuals who feel the sharp end of corrupt or ruthless institutions? Do they resist, and take the consequences, or do they comply with tyranny for the sake of an easy life? In Z, the film that first brought the director to the attention of an international audience, a left-wing French deputy is murdered by a Fascist demonstrator, who caves in his skull with a cosh. In Missing, Jack Lemmon plays a middle-aged, conservative American who realises that his search for his kidnapped son is being impeded by his own government. In Mad City, John Travolta's museum security guard, frustrated by his inability to control his own circumstances, initiates a hamfisted hostage-taking stunt: the armed police and the swarms of television cameras ensure that there is no possibility of a happy ending.

The background to this last film, however, is illuminating in itself. Costa-Gavras insists it was the film he wanted to make. But his description of how it ballooned from a relatively modest exercise to an all-star jamboree is the story of a project moving beyond a director's power to control; a low-key variation on the master-theme of his films. "At the beginning the idea was with Warner Brothers, and they had decided that they wanted to make a movie with, well, a known actress, and Jude Law. Then John Travolta read the script and said he wanted to do it. And suddenly it all became extremely big. And Warners were so happy. Funny thing was, when the production was finished everybody was sure that we would have a hit. And we didn't." He mulls over the reasons for this. "Probably the movie would have had a different reception from audiences and critics if it had not had two such big stars." He's about to say something brutally honest, but thinks better of it. "No. We'll speak about those things years later. Who would refuse John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman? Only the most stupid guy in the world."

I wonder if it matters to him whether Amen is seen by large numbers, whether a director can, in good conscience, hope that his Holocaust film is a hit. "When I did Z, nobody believed that it would do anything. The producer said that I would be more likely to have a hit if I made a movie of the telephone book. I have no idea whether anybody will go to see this film, but it is made, it is present, and that may be enough. Who knows? The cinema can sometimes produce miracles." Amen to that.