From the "People" Archives:

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: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has seen the film, hasn't she?

Michael Winterbottom: That's right, and now there's a screening for President 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 8,000 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 individual's 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 that 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 read 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 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. 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.

iW: The title originally was just "Sarajevo," wasn't it?

Winterbottom: I was sent the book, originally, and a screenplay by someone else, and those were called, "Natasha's Story." So then when I started working on it, I kind of felt that it wasn't Natasha's story -- it shouldn't be just the story of the girl. So we changed it to "Sarajevo," as a sort of working title, really. Because no one was convinced that people would flock to see it with that title. And then, in the film there's a little documentary bit where you see, scrawled on the wall, "welcome to Sarajevo." So that became the preferred option. Some people did feel that we should just take Sarajevo out of the title altogether, but I felt that the idea of the film was so much to be about the things that were happening in that particular city, so it's to be about the people from that city and to try and make people think about not only the characters in the film but all of the people that live there. And it would be wrong to suddenly lose that connection altogether and try and pretend that it's just a film about journalists.

iW: That's the nice thing -- for the first half or so, the film is so many people's different stories; and then it just centers on Emira's story. It was an unexpected turn when I was watching the film.

Winterbottom: Frank [Cottrell Boyce], in writing the screenplay, it was almost like short stories, like chapters in the film. And the central thread is Henderson, but you should got off and see other people and then come back to him. And generally we wanted to have a jagged rhythm and as many surprises as possible. Because in living in Sarajevo, one of the worst things would be never knowing what was going to happen next -- never being sure where the sniper was and where the mortar was coming from. And so that sense of not knowing where the bullet's coming from, in a way. We tried to put that into the storytelling as well.

Part of working on the screenplay was to watch as much as we could, so we watched hundreds of hours of news archives, documentary footage -- anything we could from Sarajevo. So we'd sort of seen all that and we had incorporated specific scenes into the screenplay because of what we'd seen. So, for instance, the mortar that lands in the bread queue: we'd seen that material, that was an incredibly powerful sequence. It was one shot and it was really the news cameraman running from one person to another person and back to another person, almost in a circle -- and you could see the cameraman was incredibly panicked and didn't know what to do. And then the sniper started firing and the cameraman was then running for his life. And so, having seen that, I just felt that this has got to be in the film somehow. So we then got our [fictional] journalists to go and witness that, so we could include that in the story. And so then we had to recreate it as well. So it was really working from the archive footage. And the general principal was that if we can use the real footage, then let's use the real footage. And to try and recreate as little as possible.

iW: Were there a lot of stories which didn't make the final cut?

Winterbottom: Certainly there were lots of stories that we wanted to have in the film which didn't get in: stories that we'd seen on the news and some stories that we did film -- and then it was just too much, and there were just too many stories. I wanted to make sure the film had this sort of energy and pace and compression that I felt the screenplay had. And I didn't want it to be huge and sprawling. The first cut was 3 hours of incidents, so we pulled it down to something where you could cope with it and still get the sense that there were thousands of other people who should have been in the film.

[Stephen Garrett, a frequent contributor to indieWIRE, is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles.]