indieWire

December 1, 1997

An Interview with Michael Winterbottom, Director of "Welcome to Sarajevo"  (an excerpt)

by Stephen Garrett

After making his film debut in 1995 with the killer-lesbian, road-trip romance "Butterfly Kiss", and following it a year later with "Jude", an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Jude The Obscure, director Michael Winterbottom next moves to "Welcome to Sarajevo", a complete departure from the filmmaker's styles and a considerable challenge to audiences wherever it is shown.

Shot on location and intercut with documentary footage, "Sarajevo" brings to vivid life the intensity of war correspondence, and gathers together the considerable talents of lead actors like Woody Harrelson, Marisa Tomei, and Emily Lloyd, all of whom play supporting roles to the story of one man, portrayed by Stephen Dillane, who makes it his own personal crusade to smuggle at least one child out of the devastated city to safety in another country.

Using news journalist Michael Nicholson's autobiographical novel about saving a Sarajevan child, "Natasha's Story", as source material, Winterbottom and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce have created a film that unflinchingly depicts one of the most horrifying and generally ignored wars of the late Twentieth century...

indieWIRE: Originally Jeremy Irons was attached to the project in the main role of British reporter Henderson. How did Stephen Dillane get involved?

Winterbottom: Once it was financed, that's when we really started casting. And we met quite a few people. And certainly by the time we had met Stephen, we kind of felt that, from multiple points of view -- from Miramax's point of view, Channel Four's point of view and my point of view -- that he was the right person. He had a kind of presence and a kind of questioning, really. When I first met him, he said, "I don't want to do this." And I think he felt nervous because he didn't want to make a film set in Sarajevo which was just about a British journalist. And that was my attitude as well. So I kind of felt that he would bring the same kind of balance, the same questions to what he was doing. And all the way through, he was very conscious of trying to make sure that the Sarajevan characters he meets are just as important as his character. And I think that was good in relation especially to Emira (Emira Nusevic), but also to people like the little girl in the hospital, or the baker whose son is in the camp -- in all those scenes, it's very easy for the star, for the main actor to drag all the attention. And I think he was really trying to make sure that the other actors got their scene as well...

Daily Bruin

Wednesday November 26, 1997

War Correspondence

'Welcome to Sarajevo' uses real-life footage to bring the crisis in Bosnia home

by Emily Forster

Something unique fueled the director and the star of "Welcome to Sarajevo" in their decision to make this film about the civil war in former Yugoslavia. For director Michael Winterbottom ("Jude") and actor Stephen Dillane ("Hamlet"), their decision went beyond typical temptations like getting money, critical acclaim or popularity. They did it for the importance and integrity of the film's subject matter.

"I didn't get drawn to the role. I got drawn to the film and the opportunity to find out more about this fascinating piece of recent history," Dillane says. "Every now and then in my job you get the opportunity to get paid and find out more about something that you're already interested in. And I welcomed the opportunity to work with Michael Winterbottom, who has great respect for the subject matter of this film."

Dillane and Winterbottom's mutual respect for the story results in a film that has created quite a stir in American politics. Based on a true tale from war correspondent Michael Nicholson's novel, "Welcome to Sarajevo," the film has caught the attention of some bigwigs in the United States government.

"Richard Holbrooke (U.S. envoy to Bosnia) has seen it and Madeline Albright (Secretary of State) has seen it, and they were saying that they're showing it to Clinton," Winterbottom says. "They're kind of hoping they can use the film in a way to make people in America a bit more aware of Sarajevo, which might help them justify keeping troops in Bosnia.

"If that works then that's great. If there's any kind of specific benefit, then that's fantastic," Winterbottom continues. "But my purpose was more to ask a question: How is it possible to watch these stories on TV, stories like what happened in Sarajevo and not do that much or feel that much about it?"

The question Winterbottom poses is one that Dillane had to explore in order to play Henderson, a seasoned war correspondent in Sarajevo. Playing a veteran journalist who loses his objectivity and becomes personally involved in the effort to save children, Dillane needed to explore why his character becomes so frustrated with this particular war. Dillane found that filming in and around Sarajevo not only helped him, but aided the entire cast and crew in understanding the trauma that this war caused.

"I think it was crucial that we filmed on location, and I think it would have been a very different film if we hadn't," Dillane says. "Apart from the authenticity of the settings, I think it's very important that everybody connected with the film and experienced for themselves what war does."

He continues, "We were there six months after the war finished, and it was a shattering experience to see a place that's been devastated in the way that it has. With every move that you took, with every place that you look, you can't help but be reminded of what people can do to each other. And you were always having conversations with people that had been through this experience and had something to say about it."

Specifically helpful to Dillane was getting a chance to talk to the journalists that covered the war. He learned a great deal about their frustration with television audiences that passively watched the gruesome sights they filmed.

"I think the impression I got was that the correspondents themselves were passionately concerned with the war and what they were experiencing," Dillane says. "They were desperate to try and get their stories out to the rest of the world, and no one was paying the blindest bit of attention. The response didn't seem to match what was going on. I think the journalists were doing their best to get something out of us, and the fact that we didn't respond made them very angry.

"So they had to ask themselves, 'Is it possible to get through to people that sit there and flip through the channels?' Are we as a culture able to respond in the way that we should? Is it something about the way that we live now, which means that something will happen in some state of America and we'll go, 'Oh, that's happening in Kansas. It's not happening here so we don't give a shit.' It's quite a significant thing ­ who are we responsible for?"

Winterbottom is optimistic that these questions will force audiences to recall the coverage from Sarajevo during the war. By using actual archive footage throughout the film, he knows audience reaction will be quite different when the images once shown on television screens are suddenly blown up and contextualized.

"I hope people can watch the film who perhaps don't know much about Sarajevo, haven't followed it, aren't particularly interested, and in watching it, they can think, 'Hang on ­ how come I wasn't more into this?'" Winterbottom says.

While proud of the film's messages, Dillane wants people to know that "Welcome to Sarajevo" is not a one-and-a-half-hour-long guilt trip.

"I think in a way the film is kind of a nudge to us all," Dillane says. "It's not about feeling guilty, but about reflecting on how this was allowed to happen. There were concentration camps. We saw them. They were on the front page of all our newspapers ­ concentration camps. This was the thing that we all grew up thinking, 'This will never happen again,' and there it was. But the reaction from people was next to nothing."

Dillane reminds us that it did happen and it was, after all, a war.

Variety

Monday May 19, 1997

Brit legit can Cannes, too. (British thespians)

by Matt Wolf  (an excerpt)

CANNES Would there be a Cannes Film Festival without the British theater? Of course, but greatly diminished, particularly in a year in which a May 10 fashion parade of theater-trained British talent (Rufus Sewell, Emily Watson, Jude Law, etc.) atop the Palais du Festival managed, however momentarily, to steal attention away from the Spice Girls. Consider the evidence:

In "Welcome to Sarajevo," Stephen Dillane tackles the main role of English journalist Michael Henderson with a restrained, matter-of-fact authority that embodies the precisely judged, understated cool of Michael Winterbottom's ultimately searing film. "Who is this guy?" people were heard to ask after a screening.

The answer would be known to any British theater devotee. From the original Royal National Theater cast of Brian Friel's "Dancing at Lughnasa," where he twirled Brid Brennan's withdrawn Agnes around the garden in a jaunty version of "Anything Goes," through to his self-mocking, cynical Hamlet for Peter Hall on the West End, Dillane has been a theatrical mainstay for much of the last decade. (Sadly, he opted out of the Broadway "Lughnasa.")

In for Irons

Houston Chronicle

Sunday January 11, 1998

Serious role-playing

Dillane takes part to heart in `Sarajevo'

by Louis B. Parks

STEPHEN Dillane seems as serious as the journalist he plays in Welcome to Sarajevo. And that's pretty darn serious.

In the much-acclaimed Miramax film, which has finally reached Houston - it's playing at the Landmark Greenway 3 - Dillane plays Henderson, an experienced British journalist who becomes, against all his professional instincts, personally involved in the civil war in this once beautiful Yugoslavian city.

No doubt Dillane is in a serious mood for talking about the film, a compelling work about a true horror story of our time. It's easy to see why this British stage actor was cast in the role. His low-key intensity seems to say, "No goofing around."

When he finally does laugh and cut up a bit, late in our chat, it's a pleasant surprise.

Henderson is based, loosely, on real-life British TV reporter Michael Nicholson, whose book, Welcome to Sarajevo: Natasha's Story, served as a starting point for director Michael Winterbottom. Like Henderson, Nicholson smuggled an orphan out of Sarajevo to his home in England.

However, the movie is based on many other experiences.

"This is about somebody who was a journalist who took a child out of Sarajevo," Dillane said. "As far as I'm aware, that's the only connection."

The film, which features Woody Harrelson and Marisa Tomei in small roles, uses a near-documentary look to tell its story. This journalistic approach, free of sentimentality, easy moralizing and handy bad guys, increases the film's impact. It not only seems real but also compels us to contemplate the significance of what we are seeing.

Interspersed in the film are excerpts from actual media coverage of the war, plus TV comments from American, British and other political figures. The comments are usually highly ironic when contrasted with the events in the story.

They also indicate the mixed messages Westerners were getting on Sarajevo. The film attempts to make some sense of why we were so unclear about the war.

"We get to reevaluate what our reaction was to this thing happening," Dillane said. "Everybody who watched the news and read the newspapers at the time was a little confused about what was going on there. It wasn't clear, really.

"I think any attempt to understand what goes on in a war is worth making. Particularly a war that was so close to home for us in Europe and, to some extent, to America as well. We are all the same culture. It was occurring on the edges of the `West.' "

Dillane, 40, spent three years as a newspaper journalist before going into acting. He has developed a cynical attitude about how the war was covered, an attitude that does not speak well for either journalism or Western politicians.

"I think an element of deliberate befuddlement went on there, on the part of the Western governments, because some people did not want us to get involved," Dillane said.

"There were journalists in Yugoslavia writing stories that seemed to demand some sort of response from the West. How can these things happen and us not do anything? How can you have concentration camps in 1995? How can we know about them and let them continue, when we were all brought up with the (post-Holocaust) mantra that never again would this be allowed to happen?"

That's why he believes films such as Welcome to Sarajevo are important, to keep such tragic events from being forgotten.

"It's always important for writers, painters, poets, playwrights, to attempt to make that imaginative journey into war and death and how everything is changed by it," he said.

Yet Dillane almost turned the role down. A dedicated stage actor, he has often passed on movie roles because they're less interesting than what he could get in the theater. Among his few movie parts is Horatio in Mel Gibson's Hamlet.

The lead role in Welcome to Sarajevo was clearly a major part, if only because it was partly financed by an American studio, Miramax.

But to Dillane, that was a bad sign. He was afraid the story would go Hollywood, doing a superficial, mushy story about a heroic journalist saving a cuddly kid. (If arty Miramax scared him that much, imagine how fast he would have run if it had been a real Hollywood studio.)

But he watched some of the films of director Michael Winterbottom, including Jude and Butterfly Kiss and decided he would be in good hands.

For all its harsh reality, Welcome to Sarajevo does have one Hollywood touch: the presence of Harrelson and Tomei. They are featured in the advertising as prominently as Dillane, though their roles are small.

"You'd have to ask Michael Winterbottom (about casting Harrelson and Tomei)," Dillane said. "I'm sure there are financial reasons and marketing.

"I think he would say, particularly with Woody, there is a valid point to be made. Woody plays a journalist who says, `Back home nobody has heard of Sarajevo, but everybody has heard of me.' Which, it seems, is the way a lot of American news reporting is done. People latch onto a particular personality.

"That's given a lot more resonance by the fact that everyone has heard of Woody Harrelson who hasn't heard of Sarajevo.

"Other than that, it's a showy part for somebody a bit louder than normal, and Woody's the man." He gives a small laugh. "He's a fine actor."

Harrelson's high profile runs the risk of distracting from a piece that goes to great lengths to establish a sense of documentary realism.

"One of the important things about this film is that the acting is invisible," Dillane said. "You weren't aware of actors. It's a piece driven by events and by the town and by death, which is the ever- present invisible character.

"But that's the way films are, the way America is. People want personalities, it seems.

"(Woody and Marisa) are both very committed and very serious and were doing the job for all the reasons we were. They can't help it if they're well-known."

From talking to journalists who had been in Sarajevo, Dillane developed a new respect for what they endure, and he discovered that many were not as uninvolved as their image might suggest.

"I don't envy them," he said. "The ones I spoke to, on the whole, seemed to be very keen to both do their job to impart a story to us, and at the same time not ignore that they are human beings witnessing terrible events.

San Francisco Chronicle

Sunday November 23, 1997

Welcome To the Big Screen

British stage star Dillane makes switch for `Sarajevo'

by Ruthe Stein

With Daniel Day-Lewis and Ralph Fiennes spending most of their time in frontof a camera, the mantle of "brilliant star of the British stage" has passed on to Stephen Dillane. One critic wrote that his "Hamlet" established him as "the world's most important young Shakespearean" and that Dillane "could easily find himself a matinee idol on the basis of this success."

But Dillane has resisted parlaying his notices into a movie career. When he was playing Hamlet, or Prior in the Royal National Theatre's acclaimed production of "Angels in America," he got calls out of the blue from Hollywood producers and agents.

"It was a kind of bandwagon," he recalls. "People were calling up and saying, `We hear you're great,' when they don't know what you've done or anything about you. It's one of the weird things about the movie business."

One day a call came that was a lot more than a feeler. Director Michael Winterbottom had acquired the rights to a memoir by British newsman Michael Nicholson, who had crossed the line of journalistic objectivity while covering the war in Sarajevo when he took out an orphaned Bosnian girl. Winterbottom wanted Dillane to star in a film, playing a character loosely based on Nicholson.

Dillane resisted at first. "The idea of Sarajevo and Hollywood in the same sentence seemed tricky," he says. "Going into Sarajevo six months after a war is finished to make a film, well, it seemed you would be exploiting the situation whatever you do."

It was only after long talks with Winterbottom and seeing his work, including "Butterfly Kiss" and "Jude," that Dillane decided "if anyone was going to make an honest film about the war and not try to remold the events, it would be Michael."

The film, "Welcome to Sarajevo," starring Woody Harrelson and Marisa Tomei along with Dillane, opens Wednesday.

Winterbottom says he cast Dillane because the actor had the kind of seriousness that made him believable as a journalist. With his rumpled hair and casual way of dressing, Dillane, 40, looks more like a journalist than a movie star. And he is serious bordering on somber, a demeanor warranted by the film's subject.

Dillane, who had never been anywhere near a war zone, found Sarajevo, the once-cosmopolitan city that hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics, to be in a horrible state. It had been besieged by Bosnian Serb military groups, who shot civilians and destroyed neighborhoods.

"Whenever you confront something really extraordinary you always wish you were feeling more than you are. But it was desperate, absolutely desperate," Dillane says.

Although the cast and crew had anticipated resistance to their filming, the local people turned out to be surprisingly amiable. "I think they had been through so much suffering that whether someone comes and makes a film or not didn't really matter," Dillane says.

To prepare for the role, he talked to many journalists who had covered the conflict. "They all expressed frustration and anger at the fact that they had been writing these stories which by their very nature they felt demanded some kind of response from the governments of their countries, from the United States or Britain or France or Germany," Dillane says. "But nobody seemed to be paying the blindest bit of attention, and I think it drove them mad."

SOUL-SEARCHING

He discovered a "great deal of soul-searching" among the journalists. "They felt they somehow weren't communicating what was going on to the rest of the world because if they had, something would have happened."

Anger over that situation, Dillane believes, is what drove Nicholson to take a child out of the country. At least he could do something to help one person.

Nicholson has said Dillane "played me to perfection. Bad-tempered and uncooperative -- things he must have heard from so-called friends of mine."

This endorsement confuses Dillane, since in his mind he wasn't trying to portray Nicholson. The character even has been given a different name in the movie.

"I didn't read his book, and I only met with Mr. Nicholson a couple of times," Dillane says. "I had no intention of taking anything from his life or impersonating him. As far as I'm concerned, the movie isn't about Mike Nicholson. It's about Sarajevo. His story is a kind of glass through which you see everything else."

Dillane's scenes with Emira Nusevic, a young girl from Sarajevo who plays the orphan, are very touching. Emira had never acted before. "It was a big adventure for her," Dillane says...

MORE FILM DEALS

Dillane is waiting to hear whether a couple of other film offers are going to materialize. No matter what happens with them, he is set to do "Uncle Vanya" on the London stage early next year.

The Guardian

Friday November 7, 1997

Shellshock in Sarajevo Stephen Dillane, star of Welcome To Sarajevo, will never forget his time in Bosnia. These are extracts from his diary

Welcome to Sarajevo, a vast yard full of tramcars with holes in, blocks of flats with holes in and no glass.

Suburban lawns and verges are now allotments. The city is cushioned in gentle hills, which was where the guns were. `Shell them till they're on the edge of madness,' said General Mladic. This is Sniper Alley and here is the Holiday Inn, yellow and famous.

Here's where Martin Bell used to climb in the back window. The front was a no-go area. Some staircases have been blown away.

There's a curfew at 11pm (they still fear attacks from the hills). In a white, armoured Land-Rover, through empty streets, we hunt down a late bar and study Serbo-Croat. `Micky' drives us as he did the CNN crews. He's a Serb from the city. He sent his wife to Belgrade three years ago.

Day two: the minefield lecture on how to avoid being blown up. Two people from the clearing squad were killed last week. `Proper' mine-clearing means prodding the ground every square centimetre, but it's cheaper to do every three. Mined areas are taped off - do not put even a toe past the tape. Avoid rough ground.

Walking round the parliament buildings. Bullet holes, shell holes, mortar holes. I notice that shells must have gone out as well as in. Shocking for some reason. The trees are in full leaf, which seems incongruous.

Up at Treetops where we'll film the last scene. Looking down on four graveyards, three of which are new, and the river - people sunning themselves and swimming.

Into the Turkish quarter for cheese pie and coffee. Smiles are met with smiles. A tall, thin man walks by, every sinew twisted and tight with rage. He is shouting and spitting. People don't look at him and they get out of his way.

High security at the TV station, a concrete bunker built to be the last stronghold. Talked with a CNN crew. Jackie Shymansky who's been here throughout the war. When she visits her grandparents' farm in Winnipeg she gets frightened about walking on grass for fear of mines. And she had a panic attack at a friend's wedding because there was a crowd, and a crowd means mortars.

The orphanage. This director took over when the previous one went into hiding - he was blamed for the death of children on a convoy leaving town. He seemed tired of the West and cynical of our motives. His table was covered in visiting cards from journalists and charities. Entirely unprepared for the hugs and kisses from the four-year-olds.

The birds are now nesting in the shell-holes.

Up by the Jewish cemetery there's remnants of a Serbian checkpoint. On rocky ground above here the guns sat with their gunners. We look over the town. Not a roof in sight in the near distance, just walls. And beyond them the city of sitting ducks. The Holiday Inn is absurd - bright yellow like a dizzy canary caught in the crossfire. Close by, among the absence of roofs, a man is tending his garden. No roof, no windows, but the roses are staked and taped in the freshly turned ground.

We look at an unexploded mine with its trip wire by the roadside.

Lunch is a barbecue beside the burnt-out football stadium. The third assistant director says he fought here. Gypsies with children and horses rummage in the debris.

Goran (who plays Risto) was in the Yugoslav National Army when war broke out but ended up fighting for his village in Croatia. He's young but has grey hair. Later, he'll take time off from filming to play Hamlet in Dubrovnik.

Dobrinje. Nothing prepared us for this. A housing estate near the airport. House after house, room after room, simply riddled with bullet holes. Not a square inch has escaped bullets, shells or shrapnel. A surprise to see a sparrow.

Filming the bread-queue massacre. The street is strewn with extras - sprawling, chatting, smoking. Some have lost limbs and now they're impersonating people who've lost limbs. Fake blood painted on stumps. Woody is signing autographs for the US troops.

Cannes. Mobile phones, sunglasses, dinner jackets. We talk and talk all day and lean against trees to be photographed. Gold-coloured festival cars with flags take us 50 yards to the cinema. Crowds call for Woody. Banks of photographers each side of a red carpet.

Sarajevo film festival. The centre is more lively. Glass, lights, Nikes and roller blades. More bars and cafes. Tickets for the U2 concert on sale from an old Beetle.

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Notes