Michael Winterbottom: Interviews

An Interview with Michael Winterbottom, Director of Welcome to Sarajevo

22 An Interview with Michael Winterbottom, Director of Welcome to Sarajevo Stephen Garrett/1997 From indieWIRE, 1 December 1997. Reprinted by permission. 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 style 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: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has seen the film, hasn’t she? Winterbottom: That’s right, and now there’s a screening for President stephen garrett / 1997 23 Clinton. And I think that Albright said that anything that makes people think about Sarajevo is a good thing, especially since the [American] troops are supposed to leave next summer. So they’re beginning Congressional debates soon about whether they should stay beyond the middle of next summer. So I think they kind of felt that anything that reminded people about what it had been like might focus people on the fact that it is worthwhile to keeping the eight thousand troops there to maintain the peace. iW: Did you ever think that you would be a political filmmaker? Had you considered yourself to be one before? Winterbottom: I’m always a bit suspicious about that description because I’m not sure, really, what “political” means. I mean, I think these days when the personal is political and the political is personal, it can mean anything, really. So [the usage] tends to be to try and give significance to something and say, “Well, it’s a political thing.” The aim of this film was really to try and give some sense of what was happening there, to try and show something of individuals’ experience of Sarajevo and then maybe from that to build up a bigger picture. iW: But to have screenings for presidents is quite a change. Winterbottom: Our hope when we made the film was that it might bring Sarajevo to the attention of people, because the starting point for making the film was a sense of the bizarreness—that here’s a war happening in the middle of Europe, we’re watching it on television, you can see it every day, and yet we’re not doing anything about it—we’re not doing anything to stop it. And suddenly when I went to Sarajevo the first time, that was very much the message I got from people we met. It was terrible to go through what they had to go through, but it was made even more frustrating that they knew people could see it and people were watching it as it happened. So in a way, it was a bit like a spectator sport. iW: What was it like working with the people at the Sarajevo-based SAGA Films? Winterbottom: It was good. We saw them the very first time we went there, and we showed them the script, and they were about to start filming their own film. But their attitude was: of course ours is a film from the outside, seen through the eyes of journalists coming to watch what’s happening. They were making a film from the inside. But they wanted audiences in America and audiences in Europe to see something 24 michael winterbottom: inter views of what was going on. And so they felt the film reflected enough of their experience to be worthwhile working on. They wanted to be as closely involved as possible. So they were really helpful. iW: Originally, Jeremy Irons was attached to the project in the main role of British reporter Henderson...