Interview mit Dušan Milić

Filmnews.at traf Dušan Milić , den 38-jährigen serbischen Regisseur von „Gucha“, im Wiener Hotel Triest zum Gespräch.

Filmnews.at : Where did you get the idea to set a lovestory around the Gucha festival?

Dušan Milić : First of all I wanted to make a film about trumpet music and trumpet players in the Gucha festival. And this love story came along and afterwards, because the main conflict in this kind of music in Serbia is that whites are playing a completely different music style from the gipsys. And (...) I just imagined (...) this kind of love story between a black man and a white girl and immediately this Shakespearean “Romeo and Juliet”–story came to my mind and I just stole it from him (...) to fit my story and made a happy end at the end, not a tragic end.

Filmnews.at : Where and how did you find the actors since the majority are primarily musicians?

Dušan Milić : 80% of them are non-actors, they are for the first time in front of a camera, except Juliana’s father, Juliana’s brother, Juliana’s mother and two more actors maybe in the whole film – they are the only professional actors. All others are professional musicians or people picked from the street, (...) because I liked their faces or something like that. I wanted to have this kind of reality, that they are not faking playing trumpets or other instruments. (...) In Serbia there is not a single one gipsy actor, professional actor, so you have to find them on the streets, you have to find them in between none-actors. So I chose then to pick them from different bands, (...) I wanted to have real musicians so all the gipsys are almost from real existing bands playing in Gucha.

Filmnews.at : “Gucha” is not just about the love between Romeo and Juliana but also it seems about the coming of age of Romeo. Throughout the film he can be heard in voiceovers, and we can hear him play the trumpet. Juliana, on the other hand, remains relatively quiet, she is not talking very much...

Dušan Milić : Yes, but you know what, in a longer version of the film they are speaking to each other a lot more than it is right now, but I thought it is maybe to intellectual for this kind of film to have two very young people, 16 and 15, to have such a long conversation about (...) love and what you mean to me and things like that. So I just wanted to develop it through the pictures, you know, so I eliminated everything, not just from Juliana’s side but as well from Romeo’s side and then, afterwards, I just put this film on the level of Romeo’s story, inventing this off-screen comments of Romeo himself. Because somehow it is a film about Romeo, they are not sharing very same space, you know, it is a little bit more about Romeo, because it is a film about trumpet players, and he is one of them who falls in love with a white girl.

Filmnews.at : I was very surprised when I read that Mladen Nelevic, who played the character of Satchmo, is not a professional trumpet player!

Dušan Milić : I was afraid a lot before shooting, because I know Mladen is a realy good actor, but I didn’t know how he will behave with a trumpet in his hands. But we found a solution, one very simple solution, and that was when we shot him in close-ups, when this details are most evident and most dangerous to see: When he is playing trumpet, my composer was standing behind the camera, would raise his hands up and give this keys to Mladen which finger has to press when, you know, so Mladen was looking at him (...), imitating him behind the camera. (...) So it was a long shooting of course and (...) in the post production of music we had to make some changes in the tone of the trumpet, if Mladen missed some tone just to cover everything not to show people that it was faked.

Filmnews.at : On Satchmo: his character remains relativily ambivalent and is, at the same time, the most concise character to whom Romeo must prove himself. Satchmo renounces racism, since his idol is the black musician Louis Armstrong, yet he seems to disapprove of Romeo because he is Romanies. On one hand, Satchmo loves his daugther, on the other, he tends to violence and rage. How do you see his character?

Dušan Milić : That’s like every Serb is, you know... I chose Mladen for this role because in the same time I think you can feel this kind of raw power that he has in himself, maybe mean power sometimes, and sometimes he can be very warm and a loving person, you know, with a big love for his daughter and things like that. (...) That was my point which I wanted to underline in the film, that his idol is Louis Armstrong, the (...) very black man, very good trumpet player, but he is not realising that, until his daughter falls in love with a gipsy guy. He is not in his heart and his guts a real racist because he likes Armstrong’s music, you know, so he cannot be that, and he realises that at the end of the film. So I just wanted to underline this kind of trade in his charakter.

Filmnews.at : The film was shot during the acutal festival. Did this in any way complicate your work?

Dušan Milić : Yes it did, I had to shoot it during one festival, because otherwise I don’t have any time or opportunity to bring all this hundreds of thousands of people there, and it was very difficult. We shot it for eleven days in Gucha, the festival was extended for a couple of days more because of us, because the organizers knew that we will not shoot everything and that we have to wait for another year. (...) We shot it in this one week and a half with three cameras, with 129 people behind the cameras, with all the actors, the whole two bands, and it was really, really, really exhausting, after that we had three or four days off because we were completely exhausted. (...) You cannot control masses, you know, you cannot control lots of people who are very drunk, and it was all around us all the time a couple of policemen, because we were in danger maybe somebody will break our camera ore something like that. But on the other side we had to stay some kind of undercover, because when they see a lot of people behind the camera everybody is watching in the camera. So it was a really difficult time, but somehow we shot it and had a lot of material from this Gucha.

Filmnews.at : Thank you very much!

Das Interview führte Sabina Zeithammer

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