As a young boy growing up outside Sarajevo, Jasmin Dizdar dreamed up film sequences in his literature class that compelled his teacher to send him straight to the film club. They went something like this: Coffee bar. Boy and girl talking to each other. Bomb explodes under their table. They look at each other. A leg is left laying on the ground. "Is this your leg?"
Not destined for literary greatness, Jasmin Dizdar, who has lived in Bosnia and Prague and is now based in London, turned to filmmaking and has won numerous accolades for his 15 short films. His first feature, and first English-language film, Beautiful People, is no different, having garnered the Prix Un Certain Regard for Best Film at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.
"I had this tremendous desire to communicate," said Dizdar in a recent interview. "I always felt most powerful communicating through some medium. I'm not a great descriptive person, telling stories in words. I like talking through images and dialogue," said the filmmaker, who described his latest film as a story about people living in a metropolitan city who are very different and contradictory to each other yet united by the same event-war-whether it's military war, war within the family, or war at the office.
During his summer holidays at the age of 16, Dizdar made his first foray into filmmaking by writing and producing an animated short (which was about the limit of his resources at the time). "I just thought, I'm pushing toward something. I didn't know what it was. It's not like I saw Citizen Kane and had to make films. I just felt like I was walking through a tunnel," he said.
Dizdar took that first short to a festival, where he realized the captivating effect his work could have on an audience. "I saw those 70 or 80 people staring at something I did in my kitchen," he recalled. "Suddenly, I had this power over an audience. They reacted to something I created that was so simple. I couldn't wait to do another one."
Onions and Authenticity
After writing and directing more short films, Dizdar finally embarked on his first full-length feature with Beautiful People. Casting the ensemble provided a very hands-on process for the filmmaker and his casting directors, Suzanne Crowley and Gilly Poole, who scoured London for the multi-ethnic cast. In addition to holding many auditions and viewing tapes, Dizdar would see people in the street and ask them to be in his film. His preferred method of casting the film was to describe certain characters to his friends in the hopes they had seen someone fitting the description.
But a look is not all Dizdar seeks in his actors, especially those with no acting experience. "It's the right personality," he explained. "Some people have a certain power that you just can't help but stare at them, like the pregnant Bosnian girl in the film. I was looking for the Bosnian answer to Janis Joplin. Not only does she look like that, but she has that quality." Walentine Giorgiewa, who played that role, was a Bulgarian girl who worked at Wimpy's, a London equivalent to McDonald's, when she was discovered.
Not glamourous in the least, her authenticity was just what Dizdar wanted. "She'd come on the set and say, "I'm really sorry, Jasmin, I know I smell of onions, I didn't have time to take a shower.' And I'd say, "That's exactly what I want. I want you to smell of onions.'" he recalled.
Dizdar worked with three types of performers for Beautiful People. The first were professionally trained theatre actors, including Rosalind Ayers, Charles Kay, Charlotte Coleman, Nicholas Farrell, Heather Tobias, Roger Sloman, and Siobhan Redmond.
The second category of actors were what Dizdar called naturals, those who don't know anything about professioanl acting but appear in the film as themselves. "They don't know about pace or building character," he said. The characters of the careless adolescent Griffin (Danny Nussbaum) and his drug-addicted mates (Steve Sweeney and Jay Simpson) fall into this group of authentic characters. And Gilbert Martin, who portrays a war correspondent heavily affected by his experience in Bosnia, used to be a plumber.
Finally, there were many people in the film who play characters but had never been on a film set. "They're really just sort of frightened and vulnerable, but you just have to go over it and they do it," he said of directing the non-actors. It was the realism that these people brought to their characters that Dizdar was drawn to. Though they never spent time with an acting coach, Dizdar left them to discover their characters through their personal experiences, giving a very documentary-style feeling to the film. But, he maintained that the script was entirely a product of his imagination.
Bosnian Bond
Dizdar set out to make an ambitious film, almost a mini-James Bond film, he said. "Car crashes and parachuting, war zones, UN transport planes, anything you can think of that Jurassic Park has is in this film," he joked. But his ambition was realized on a smaller scale. Claiming that he destroyed all the rules of first-time filmmaking by undertaking this project, Dizdar insists that perspective and persistence are paramount.
"You can do a very ambitious film, and you can let your dream go wide and film it. Don't just keep it in your drawer and say, "I'll never make this because it will cost XY billion dollars.'"
Dizdar also found honesty to be quite helpful in gaining access to some of the secured areas where he planned to film. Though no camera crews were allowed in the Army areas involved with missions to Kosovo, Dizdar was granted access despite the danger. "All the planes that you see in the film, they're coming straight from Kosovo; the pilots are coming off the planes, getting into our planes, playing in our film, getting back into the loaded plane and going back to Kosovo," he explained.
The writer/director noted that it took a skillful yet truthful approach to gain admittance to the secured area. "We asked them to read the screenplay," he recounted. "We were very nice and said, This is an honest film about us. The impression was that we're not making this to get something. We're making this film because it's an honest film about people, and we need that scene in order to make that point."
Though Beautiful People is filled with tense, dramatic moments, including scenes involving reformed youth Griffin, who brings back a blind boy from war-torn Bosnia, and many heartwrenching images of families shattered by the war at hand and private wars fought behind closed doors, Dizdar has learned an important lesson about filmmaking in his homeland.
"Central European filmmaking teaches you that a human comedy has far more depth and can say far more about real situations and real life than a drama can." And his film is aptly populated with moments of comedy that illuminate the human struggle.
To wit, Dizdar's next film, also an English-language feature set in London, is a comedic satire about very busy executives torn between their family lives and the office-a film about "how office equipment can construct and destruct your life," he said.
Since he began to tell his stories through images and scripted dialogue, Dizdar has learned how to affect others with his work. But he maintains a carefree attitude given his success. "I learned that if you're honest and driven, somehow people respond. But we'll see with my next film." BSW