LTHOUGH CELEBRATED in
Europe, French-Serbian mov-
iemaker Emir Kusturica has
never quite received his due
stateside. This is perplexing
because the surrealism that is a trademark
of his films seems well-suited for American
audiences. He’s won the Palme d’Or twice
(the second time for his war film
Underground in 1995) and won Best Director
at Cannes for the four-and-a-half-hour epic
Time of the Gypsies. The propulsive energy
and dream logic of his films have earned him
a reputation in some circles as the Eastern
European Federico Fellini. But Thomas
Pynchon may be a better comparison: In one
segment of Underground, a rogue monkey
occupies a homemade tank and fires live
rounds at a wedding party.
In recent years, Kusturica has shifted
his focus from building a story to building
towns. He started the Küstendorf Film and
Music Festival in a small mountain village
that he had built in remote southwestern
Serbia. He also developed an extravagant
stone village in his birth country of Bosnia,
dedicated to Nobel prize-winning author
Ivo Andrić.
Kusturica spoke with MovieMaker at the
13th annual Küstendorf fest about how even
though he feels somewhat pessimistic about
contemporary cinema, there are signs of hope.
—C.H.
- The most important thing to do as a moviemaker
is to create a synthesis between what you’ve seen
and learned in life, the theme of your film, and how
you tell a story. - Harmony between idea and the form is achiev-
able. When you have a strong idea, then even
80 SPRING 2020 MOVIEMAKER.COM
A
FORM FIRST
Emir Kusturica: Learn the form,
and don’t be afraid to confront
commercialization
BY EMIR KUSTURICA,
AS TOLD TO CALEB HAMMOND
THINGS I’VE LEARNED
AS A MOVIEMAKER
COURTESY OF KÜSTENDORF FILM AND MUSIC FESTIVALEMIR KUSTURICA (L) AND PURIŠA ĐORĐEVIĆ
(R) TOAST RAKIA AT THE 13TH ANNUAL
KÜSTENDORF FILM AND MUSIC FESTIVAL.the camera can be sufficient to create great
feelings, or a great intellectual reaction that
only a film could.- From the theme, everything starts.
- The theme is something that must touch
a moviemaker’s soul. Then there are skills
that you have to learn. Unfortunately, today,
cinema is overloaded with people who don’t
know the craft. In order to be able to tell
the story (or whatever you want to call it)
through the cinematic form, you have to
learn basic skills. The industry is produc-
ing thousands of TV series, where you don’t
need to know anything about cinema—you
can learn this type of directing: just ex-
changing the angle and believing that actors
are good enough to convey the story.
Cannes Film Festival used to choose be-
tween 700-800 movies, and now a program-
mer told me they received 8,000 films. So in
this proliferation, we have to take care we
don’t sink into the situation in which craft
is forgotten. - Do we create? Or do we just tell a story?
If you’re just “telling,” it could be through
verbal storytelling or even through YouTube.
Otherwise, there is a need for you to know
how to create the sequence—how to create
the whole story. You cannot just do it by
exchanging camera angles, or having four
cameras set up to be sure that you can edit
dynamically.- A film director has his moral angle from which
he sees the story—which informs where he
puts the camera. You cannot be playing with
ambivalences when you want to express your
idea. Students learn today that you put the
camera very high up, and you place it very
low, and then the idea enters. It’s now about
dynamics changing in telling this story, not
a personal view to the story. In the past, we
differentiated between Scorsese, Bergman,
Fellini, Antonioni, or John Ford, by looking
at their perception of time. Do they need
more time or a kind of medium range of
time in completing the sequence?
(CONTINUED ON PG. 77)