City Pages  Minneapolis/St. Paul

January 7, 1998

Playing War

by Kate Sullivan

Sarajevo, Mon Amour: The greasy-haired, snaggletoothed beauty Henderson (Stephen Dillane) from Welcome to Sarajevo.

AT THE RISK of sounding like a movie-magazine cliché, I must acknowledge right off the bat that British actor Stephen Dillane, star of Welcome to Sarajevo, is heart-breakingly beautiful in the flesh: He has greasy long hair, crooked teeth, crumbs on his lapel, and eyes so delicate and still that one imagines they might hurt a bit to look through. I only mention this because in his role as an emotionally frayed war correspondent, Dillane isn't unattractive but he is rather forgettable--as if the character's actual body is snoozing somewhere offscreen, leaving us to watch his sleepwalking ghost stumble through a hard-edged world he can't quite grasp. (By contrast, Dillane's scenery-chewing co-star Woody Harrelson seems at first to have stepped onto the wrong set.)

As it turns out, Dillane's choices say a lot about the film as a whole. "When you're that stressed and angry," Dillane says of his character, "you don't know what you're doing. You're not clear, you're certainly not attractive, you're not sexy. It's horrible. Usually, when you get a film script it's quite clear what the soundtrack is. There's various moments--the close-up, the moment when the hero suddenly realizes he's got to act, the moments of triumph. [Here, we tried] to allow every single moment to be as unfocused and ambivalent as in real life. Because you're the leading man, you often feel as if you've got to be engaging: You've got to seduce an audience into liking you, you've got to carry this film. But this one was the other way around. The challenge was to get out of the way, to not allow the audience to see you act, to have the nerve to be invisible."

It wasn't until Dillane returned home that the total experience hit him: "You get back into looking for work, and I couldn't take anything seriously at all, I didn't work for quite a few months. You can't be in close proximity to that stuff for very long without becoming a little unrecognizable to everybody else in a peacetime situation. Even with my very glancing connection to it, I had some insight into how it is that people come back and can't speak. There's nothing to talk about; people here appear to be mad. And it wasn't just me--a lot of us used to phone each other up [afterwards] and say, 'How are you getting on? Making sense yet?'

Rough Cut Q&A's

November 27, 1997

Shooting Sarajevo

"It's not a starry part, it's not a sexy part. It was really important to somehow to find a way of doing this thing that kept you out of the way, so that people's emotions would be engaged on a level which wasn't to do with identifying with an actor, with a character. It isn't a character-driven piece to me."
-- Stephen Dillane

In Michael Winterbottom's new movie Welcome to Sarajevo, Brit stage veteran Stephen Dillane plays a journalist who crosses the line between observer and participant. Set in war-torn Yugoslavia, Welcome to Sarajevo is loosely based on news correspondent Michael Nicholson's rescue of an orphan girl at a time in which the rest of the world largely ignored the Serbian siege. This is Dillane's first leading role though he doubts it will make him a star. While touring the U.S. to promote the film, Dillane spoke with Rough Cut's Christopher Brandon to discuss on-location shooting in Sarajevo, the probability of stardom and exactly how he feels about Hollywood movies like My Best Friend's Wedding.

The character you play in this movie, Henderson, is a very passionate father -- well, not really a father -- but he becomes a father to a little girl. Do you have kids of your own?

I do, yes, I have one and another one on the way.

Was it easy to do that? To develop these feelings throughout the movie toward this child?

I don't know if it's easier than for somebody who doesn't have a child. I can't remember what it's like not to have a child. But when we first got to Sarajevo and met with the director and chatted, he said, "OK, well, come meet the kids." The greeting you get from the kids, these 4- and 5-year- olds, is so overwhelming. I think it would be very hard to leave them there. [It would be hard not] to appreciate the kids in an orphanage, who run out and give you more love than you've ever had in your life. And it's staggering. It would be very hard not to do.

So you think you probably could have done the same thing your character did?

How did you prepare for the role? Did you speak to some of the journalists?

Yeah, I spoke to a lot of journalists, I read a lot of books, read a lot of books by journalists about their experiences in Sarajevo and then in Bosnia generally, or in former Yugoslavia. I read some books on the history of the conflict and the history of places, and I looked at a lot of footage of the war.

Did you get a chance to talk to the man who wrote the story?

When you went there, was it still sort of like that, or has the city changed quite a bit?

Well, it was being rebuilt, to some extent, while we were there. But to be honest, you wouldn't have been able to tell. I'm sure a lot of debris has been cleared away, but the place was devastated.

What was the first thing you thought when you saw the disruption?

It sounds a lot like some of the scenes in the movie. Did they not have to do very much setting for the movie?

Well, there's a fair bit, because [the city] was being rebuilt. So there was actually an enormous amount of work. The designers were quite extraordinary. They really were amazing. No detail, no stone was left unturned. An awful amount of work went into it because there would have been burnt-out cars everywhere, which have now been moved away. And trams would just be stopped, burnt out. So a lot of that debris has been cleared away. The buildings remain the same.

Are there still people living there?

Were there any really huge eventful things that happened while you were there?

It's much more a sense of gradually apprehending the horror of what goes on in that situation. In a way, it's a bit disappointing because you're expecting a big reaction in yourself. And there's not. You've seen the footage and everything and you go, OK, this is it, here it is. But gradually, while you're there, and perhaps because you're making a film in which you have to make this descent into what it must feel like to be there, gradually the burden of the whole thing comes down on you. One of the surprising things about it all is the people. The people are on the whole very cheerful, on the surface at least, very friendly, and you sort of expect them to be mad and bitter and angry. That would seem to be the appropriate response to what's happened.

They're in the process of rebuilding.

Did you enjoy working with the director, Michael Winterbottom?

Very much, yes. I think he's a terrific director. And he was really the reason I took the film. I felt that he had a kind of vision of the world that doesn't contain sentimentality. And sentimentality in this context would have been offensive. ... I've met people who feel that the ending is actually too cheerful for them. They don't want any kind of relief from this s--t. But there is something about the spirit of Sarajevo, which people used to talk about before the war. And I think that's captured.

Do people recognize you here in the States?

They don't recognize you in England?

No.

Do you think they will after watching Welcome to Sarajevo?

I'd be surprised. It's not that kind of part. It's not a starry part, it's not a sexy part. It was really important to somehow find a way of doing this thing that kept you out of the way, so that people's emotions would be engaged on a level which wasn't to do with identifying with an actor, with a character. It isn't a character-driven piece to me. ... The emotion is carried somewhere else. It's not carried through the actors.

I think it might be carried more or less through the city because I got a real sense that the city was what he wanted to drive the film.

Absolutely. Especially the way he uses newsreel footage. Now, was that actual stock footage or did you shoot that?

It's a mix of stuff that we shot and stock footage. But there's a lot of stock footage in there. Which is deliberate. It's to do with reinterpreting a lot of what we've already seen.

What are you doing now?

I'm not doing anything at the moment. I'm about to do a film in Ireland, and then I'm going to go on stage and do a play in London.

Do you like plays or movies better?

Do you think you'll do more American films?

I don't know. I don't differentiate, really. It's just whatever's good.

Are you more interested in working with particular directors?

No. I mean, there are directors who if they came along I would be very interested in working with. ... I would love to do another film with Michael. But it's like a combination of seeing what the part is, what the setup is, who else is in it. There's so many variables about the whole thing. How hard you want to work. Sometimes you just think to yourself, "Jesus, I don't want to do a leading part. I want something I can just wander in and do. A few days on and go home." So I don't have a plan, see what turns up.

I think Michael Winterbottom has big potential. I think Jude just blew people away when it came out.

It's the only movie I've ever seen where at the end I was really just blown away. I just had to sit there and think about that movie for a long time.

It's interesting how he does it. I think there's a culture that's come out of Hollywood which has to do with personality, character, you know, which gets blown into stars. And you actually watch people not being real. I was watching a movie coming over on the plane -- I saw the clips on this Julia Roberts film.

My Best Friend's Wedding?

Yeah. Which is just full of people not being real in any shape or form. I was sitting there and going, "Jesus, you know, there is nothing about this, nothing about the way these people are being which is in the slightest, in any way shape or form, real. There's nothing that conforms to realities as I know it. In the faces the people are making, in the expressions. It's kind of down to the poise of their cheekbones. How they hold themselves in a neutral position." As soon as you distance yourself from it, you see it, you see what a f--king [sham] this all is. It's unbearable. And I think people may be getting sick of it. I think maybe the stuff that Michael's doing is subverting all that. He's refusing to allow you to get involved in whether an actor jumps through various emotional hoops or not.

I was going to ask you about -- when you were talking about My Best Friend's Wedding -- Rupert Everett, the British actor in that. I think he's really going toward that Hollywood ....

Seems to be.

Do a lot of British actors do that?

I don't know. They used to. I don't know if they are at the moment. I mean, most British directors used to come over and sort of feel obliged to make a Hollywood film at some point. But I don't think anyone's ever succeeded over here. I don't think anyone's ever come over and actually got to be a better director. Maybe they have. I don't know. Yeah, I think that some people do want to go and do the Hollywood thing.

That's something you're not interested in at all?

I'm not looking for scripts to go whole Hollywood. It's really down to what the project is. Who's involved. You know, we use the word Hollywood as a sort of shorthand for something. But it's such a vast industry; there's so many different people involved in it. And there are some great things that come out of it. So I certainly wouldn't rule it out.

The film industry in Britain -- is it at all like that?

I don't think so. The filmmaking industry in Britain, such as it is, I don't think that people are looking to make huge amounts of money with it. It just doesn't seem to be the kind of culture to make a huge, multimillion-dollar action movie, that's kind of guaranteed an audience. But there seems to be a kind of optimism in Britain at the moment, about itself and about what is coming along. I think that some dreadful films have come out of Britain. Real dogs. But, you know, for every 10 dogs, there's one good film. There are some good things coming out. And the great thing about them is that they're not these period dramas, these English heritage films that show people in crinolines and lawns and stately homes.

Do you have any sense of the way journalism is, now that you've done this film and since the press has come such under fire since the death of Princess Diana?

Yes, I think so. As far as the foreign correspondents go, I've certainly got a lot more respect for them than I maybe would have had in other circumstances. I think they do an extraordinary job. I mean, they don't have to do it.

What was your feeling on the main theme of the movie that these foreign correspondents should really be reporting what they see, but then they sort of get involved?

I don't see that it's possible to have a kind of judgment from where we are. Certainly the war reporters that I spoke to all said that they did spend a lot of time ferrying people to hospitals and things like that. They didn't just film. Usually there is some kind of gray area in which you can both do your job and help someone else. And they were the ones with the petrol and the vehicles. They were often called upon to do those things. I'm sure there's situations in which you wouldn't film. I'm sure there are stories that we don't get, [where] the journalists or the photographers or the cameraman just say, "F--k it all. I'm not going to do this."