Make movies, not war

>> Danis Tanovic discusses his heralded No Man’s Land

by MATTHEW HAYS

Danis Tanovic doesn’t sound like someone who’s just been nominated for an Oscar. Perhaps he can be forgiven for having no Sally Fieldesque giddiness. After all, his film is hardly a feelgood, lightweight entry. No Man’s Land is one of those soul-gnawing glimpses into the absurdity of war—horrific, nasty, unblinking.

Set in Bosnia in ’93, the film opens as a group of Bosnian soldiers are killed by Serbs. After thinking that they’ve wiped everyone out, two of the Serbs then set a booby trap up for whoever finds the bodies later. They place the body of a dead Bosnian over a spring mine, assuring that whoever lifts the body will die in the mine’s blast. Before they can get away, however, a surviving Bosnian shoots one of them and holds the other hostage. Then, the Bosnian left resting on the mine wakes up—in fact, he’s not dead, just wounded. But now the surviving Serb and Bosnian must figure out how to remove the man from the mine without blowing everyone up.

Filming the front lines

There’s a gritty, nasty feeling to No Man’s Land, an aura that’s indicative of the kind of research director-writer Tanovic did. He spent two years on the front lines, filming everything he saw for the Bosnian military. “I saw it with my own eyes—everything’s better than war,” he tells me from L.A., about an hour after hearing the news of his Oscar nod. This, after the win last month at the Golden Globes in the same category. And though the Globes have proven an increasingly reliable bellwether regarding what will happen Oscar night, many are predicting the upbeat spirit of French hit Amélie will probably win over most Academy voters. “I’m just happy to be nominated,” insists Tanovic. “This is my first feature—I’m simply happy to be where I am.”

Tanovic’s award-winning documentary work—including L’Aube and Portraits d’artistes pendant la guerre—led quite naturally to this fiction feature. After his stint at Belgian film school, several docs and a couple of commercials, Tanovic felt he was ready, and penned his screenplay. He dropped it off in ’99 with some producers, and within a month had his deal, signed, sealed and delivered. “Really, this is the only way to make a movie,” he says. “I feel the director should be in control. You have producers who have faith in your project and they allow you to fulfill your vision.”
The transition from doc to fiction, he says, wasn’t a huge leap. “I don’t even distinguish between the two. There are only good films and bad films. Good films need drama, a good story, strong characters. It’s the same for fiction and non-fiction.”

Necessary interventions

With all the headaches filmmakers face, Tanovic reports that his biggest was “the weather. We had 36 shooting days and 10 days of rain. That meant the film had to be done in 26 days—not a lot of time. But the crew were superb and understood what I wanted.”
Tanovic was also handed a dream cast, an ensemble who bring the ridiculousness of war to full Technicolor life here. Branko Djuric, who’s worked with Kusturica, plays a desperate soldier with depth and surprising humour; Mike Leigh vet Katrin Cartlidge portrays an ambitious war reporter; and celebrated British actor Simon Callow delivers a rousing turn as an unfeeling British military leader.
While there are war movies Tanovic admires—including The Deerhunter, Apocalypse Now and Grand Illusion—he says there were no models for the distinctive No Man’s Land. “I didn’t want to reproduce something. I wanted to try and make something not existing before.”

Tanovic has heard the post-Sept. 11 arguments, that anti-U.S. anger means that nations should stay out of other nations’ business, but differs on this point. “If we don’t intervene, sometimes, then you end up with Rwanda. You end up with Jews slaughtered as they were in World War II. I have a question for you: if the U.S. had been without an army after Sept. 11, what would they have done? In a sense, we have to interfere. That’s why we have the UN. The world is definitely not what it should be.”
So you supported the war against Afghanistan?
“No,” Tanovic answers. “I supported the war against the Taliban.” :

No Man’s Land opens Friday, Feb. 15