Kusturica's Filming

A fluid, hardly discernible border separates the place where the scenes of Black Cat, White Cat are being filmed from the other part of the At Sujka's pub interior which was erected on the banks of the calm Danube river channel covered with old willow trees. From all sides, one can tune into snips of conversation, because next to the old windmill with broken windows, between the tables and benches made from coarsely carpentered wood, on the chairs, scattered crates, wooden boxes, scatter rugs on the floor, left over props and equipment, we come upon the amateur actors. They are mostly Gypsies. They are sitting, standing, alone or in groups, talking, making a lot of noise, calling out to each other, drinking beer, playing cards or mutely staring into the darkness, waiting to cross over to the other side of the line which vaguely separates those two worlds. "That look is worth billions. Thaaat look.... Those movements of the arms. Dance. Shake your head. I want to see madness, madness. Like this, see?", we hear the voice of the director Emir Kusturica from the other side, who is zooming in on the actor Zika Todorovic through the gaze of Dadan Korombol, one of the actors in the film, shaking his own head from left to right. "You two jump like you are dancing a local dance. Let's see. Let's go. That's right. In a circle, in a circle, in a circle. Let's go. That's it. Riiight. Come on." Emir Kusturica moves away, viewing the scene briefly, turns around and moves towards the parked van in large strides and sits straight in front of the tiny monitor.

"Are you ready Emir?", we hear the film organizer's question over the speaker. "Always", he answers incredibly calmly, taking a drag from his cigarette, clad in dark jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt.

"Quiet, quiet down there please, we're filming... Let's go. Music. Action," booms a voice from the set. We see a take on the screen which reads scene 125, take 9, fourth time. The camera zooms in for the actor's close up. He has black, tiny curls and a thin mustache which is gently swaying left-right. That's the mafia guy Dadan.

The wooden walls of the At Sujka's pub which shall survive for as long as filming does, merges with the small pub with painted walls and blends in with the film set without a visible transition. This is where we start talking to Emir Kusturica about the film which, just like Hanging House, is located in the gypsy milieu, a little movie which represents a kind of respite until the next big project: "I've always liked to run away to a gypsy story because that milieu contains the lowest level of social life which the European and global movies seem to bypass. No one deals with the poverty stricken anymore. And even if someone tries to, it's usually hopeless."

He easily relates to the ease with which the gypsy world deals with birth, life and death. He likes the joy and beauty that exist here. He likes that kind of illusion that exists in the gypsy world, since illusions nurture art.

Emir Kusturica is sitting with his back toward a wall in that little pub and thinks how that milieu offers poetic content which he has seen and felt as a very small child. He grew up and matured with the impulses which came from the top of the hills where he had lived, emitted by the gypsies.

When they were just starting to film, a man in Beocin approached him and asked, why gypsies again? "Why not make a movie about Serbs," he asked the director. He thought it was an utterly ludicrous question.

"That's ludicrous," he repeats again. "Every good story speaks of the gypsies, the Serbs and all the other people. I am only trying to pin it down to a certain environment where the fairy-tale-like quality can be predominant. I am trying to find shelter for it".

The people who belong to this story naturally are scattered in these hot days on the river bank, spending hours according to their own rhythm, living a life which has its own dynamics and action. They fish, swim in the river, nap or sleep in the vehicles as they stay awake until the early morning hours, approaching the film set tentatively at night, or watching from the fringe. Here its is difficult to discern whether they are dressed that way because of the film or whether it's their style, whether the gold chain which lies over the black turtleneck is only a film costume detail or personal dress code, since that detail impeccably goes with the stance as they are characters even outside of this film which has evolved from Gordan Mihic's script.

Emir Kusturica spends time with his actors and when he accidentally bumps into them during the day, he talks to them, explaining some things which will transport them from one world to the other without changing the authentic sentiment. "What do you mean by 'be happy'", asks someone for a particular scene which he is to film that evening. "It's like this. Just think of the moment when you'll get your money," explains the director, laying a hand over the dark-complexioned actor's shoulders who stands leaning against a clumsily erected fence next to the water. "He's a real king," says Kusturica as he looks at the worried actor. During film breaks, as he listens to the questions of the people he is spending his days with on that dusty river bank. Emir Kusturica coolly answers that he could have stood alongside the perfectly groomed, ironed, polished, fat-assed and over indulged Hollywood film directors some ten-fifteen years ago, but that's not what he wanted. "That's not what I wanted. It was my choice to screw myself here in Kovilj, to be devoured alive by the mosquitoes, making a film about the gypsies. That's my choice."

Some only see something primitive in it?

"Perhaps that is a lower level of evolution, however it offers a lot more freedom and a lot wider range for interpreting life." Emir Kusturica recently spoke to Handke on the subject and he told him that he envies the richness of the soil he comes from, he spoke of his satiated life with the same automobiles, the monotonous colors and the similar taste of the food.

Emir Kusturica stops while relating this, as something reminded him of the house which they had in Visoko and of Nagib the mechanic, well known in the area, who had installed radiators into everyone's house. He remembers an apple tree which was planted by his wife's grandmother and grandfather, who came via the Austro-Hungarian railroad track. "Those spotty apples are the tastiest apples in the world". Nagib had installed the radiator in one of their small rooms eight times and it still kept leaking. "Finally he exclaimed that the radiator was 'jinxing' him and left it to leak, after the few hundred houses in which he had installed radiators which were perfectly functioning. This one kept leaking up to the moment when they burned that house in Visoko. The same thing happens in this film as the life of the people and their interpretations never stray from the realm in which irrationality, 'calamities' and 'jinx' serve to interpret a number of life's signals and which are stored in the mystery which exists between the symbols of the black and white cat."

That sensibility had incited suspicion and criticism previously for depicting the Balkan region in a distorted way as though an ecstatic orgy was constantly being enacted here. Criticism for uncovering a certain type of mythical picture of this region where everyone only eats, drinks, kills and steals as the western world wishes to view this region anyway.

"That's a question of selection. Other things wouldn't correspond to the way I see certain things and that type of life."

Emir Kusturica listens to the question that value and esteem are usually incited by all that is opposite to such a sensibility.

"What's the opposite? A quiet, civil, family life without any passions, where long shoots provide thoughtfulness. If this nation's characteristics were thoughtfulness, or a Protestant self-denial instead of impulsive behavior, that would be possible. But if you step out into the streets and look at the people who the film needs to depict, then it is very easily concluded that the other extreme is purely an imported reality which no one would recognize as something authentic."

Which type of experience is closer to him?

"Some know the underground, others the overground," he says.

Hanging House, where that step into the gypsy world was first made, has been renounced here and attacked as a film made by a compiler and thief.

"It's a part of the tradition that the football player who plays three good games for his national team must lose out on the fourth, in order to please the 'base' which wishes to see him in his local pub once again, drunk and ruined. Any critic piece of shit identifies with the far-away Hollywood, accepting that production as the highest ideology. In the western world, in both the left and right circles, all know that it's a pure piece of shit and nothing else. However, we are a nation of destitute people, damned people who have always lived with a lack of something. Rade Serbedzija's role in Saint is directly intended to make people hate the Russians and to love Val Kilmore. The absurdity of our situation which is no longer a question of freedom but of a total non-determination lies in the fact that Serbedzija comes and is acclaimed as someone who has made it in Hollywood. I know actors who would be ashamed of such roles", says Kusturica.

But what does Emir Kusturica wish to show with his films? "What is your goal?", he listens to one part of the question and speaks, saying that he wishes to incite excitement within himself and others, he wishes to produce something between tears and laughter. "That's what I want," he says. A few days before that he spoke to a journalist from New York's Time Out magazine and told him that "his duty was to warm peoples' souls. " He stared at me, not comprehending a single word," recalls the director.

Does he believe that the characteristics of this region and the difficult quality of life is accompanied by a relative ease of artistic production?

"It goes hand in hand," answers Emir Kusturica. "This route here, this Morava-Vardar valley was always a road down which elephants passed and when something is in their way, that presents a great misfortune. When we look at this war and this tragedy which haven't occurred for the first time, we see that the same topic has been repeating itself, that there is always one circular process embedded deep in our past."

Gordan Mihic wrote this script on the basis of a story which Kusturica told him however it seems, although the director does not dwell on it, that a good script is one step away from a good movie and that the type of interaction which existed with some of his other films' script writers, didn't exist here. Therefore, as it did with Abdulah Sidran.

Does he ever think that he could accidentally meet Sidran somewhere in some European city?

No. He doesn't. "To tell you the truth, I just don't see such a reunion".

And if it accidentally happens?

"I'm certain that the reunion wouldn't be pleasant. But let me tell you, I will do all within my power to run away from Sidran, as that objectively agitates me, regardless of the fact that I manage to overcome all of that by applying my entire strength into it."

Because they can't calmly pass by each other?

They can't. He can no longer greet him in the manner in which he did when he saw his old friend from Sarajevo after six years. He can't simply say "where've you been, how's it going," as happens when Sarajevans meet up after a number of years. "I couldn't tell Sidran "where've you been, how's it going," because he had identified me with the demolishers of my back yard. He put me in a place where I don't belong and used up four years re-creating me into a monster which the world had never before seen... I don't see that reunion", says Kusturica. "You know, the greatest question is what keeps a man in balance. What keeps me balanced is my faith which knows of no calculations and which doesn't have a target group in order to achieve something in life."

I tell Emir Kusturica that a possible explanation for such a relation towards himself lies in the horrific destruction of Sarajevo and he says "the people over there are fucked up". "I had written a long time ago in Monde that the act of shelling a city was conducted by mad dogs. However I can't comprehend that the slogan 'whoever's not with us is against us' is embedded so deeply. Because, if someone isn't with Sidran that doesn't mean that he's against the Muslims. Anyway, it is utterly stupid to believe that things can go back to normal and pick up from where they had been cut off five years ago.'"

Where does he see the root of that animosity?

He thinks that he didn't fulfill the expected role and was therefore elected to be a scapegoat. He didn't accept the new role which all had acquired in this new reality, jealously and fiercely guarding it. "If I had been a Muslim nationalist, I would have totally fulfilled what certain circles expect of me. But I'm not. I'm not a nationalist even though I have been friends with them since Tito's days. They are intelligent and gifted people. During Tito's times, they presented the educated part of society."

Maybe he was given the other role on account of that?

"I was given a wrong name and I was brought to a paradoxical situation", answers Emir Kusturica shortly. He says that his experience following the film Dolly Bell had opened him up towards the world, instead of sealing him off into the darkness of chauvinism, something he has been accused of in certain circles. "It's not my fault that the birth of a country is anachronistic and way overdue in the 20th century, nor is it my fault that the nation is the basic generator of a state in global experience, nor is it my fault that inverse processes had occurred here. As they had fought so hard for a multi-national society in the west, why don't they help us out here? We are the only ones who have all that the west hopes for, we are mixed unlike Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia. When a person sees that, and speaks of it, not belonging anywhere, he then becomes a professional opponent to everything. My crime consists of the fact that I had chosen the flag of the country I am now living in. That is my crime.", he repeats. "Because I had chosen the culture in which people such as Andric, Crnjanski, Mesa Selimovic had created and lived."

Why?

He briefly says that it fills him with more admiration to have Andric's sculpture instead of Sidran's in his local park. He believes there's a world of difference in it and adds - "dramatic". "It's a dramatic difference", he says. "I had forsaken the cliché, national expectations. All logic, specially media and strategic ones, were to turn me into a Muslim nationalist". He sees the nation only as a cultural determination, he feels the nation "on the level of the color of their eyes" and says that the apple tree from Visoko ties him most to his soil... "those hard, juicy, spotty apples, tastiest in the world... that shakes me up when I remember them". Pathetic? "It's not", he says since all is in the way you do things. He insists on that: the basis of his esthetics aren't in literature and films, but rather in the way Sid Vicious had sung My Way in the eighties as that topples all, even melodramatic forms. "And then, between Sidran and the apple, I always choose the apple".

Establishment

"My character is such that I feel no need to mingle with famous people. To be acquainted with Milorad Vucelic never meant that I had the same political beliefs especially not now when he is a close Yugoslav United Left (JUL) associate. However, lack of true arguments had always produced sayings here. One of the most famous one goes 'you are identical to the ones you mix with'. From that primitive consciousness which pretends to be civilized, the Belgrade circle and those close to it generate such Bolshevik etiquettes. Imagine if, let's say, someone would hold it against Lou Reed for associating with the publisher who he has known from youth and who is on top of that a decent family man and gentle soul who never makes his head ache."