 |
| Director Igor Drljača attends the Canadian Screen Awards. |
Drljača recently took a break from doing postering for the film (indie filmmaking is a DIY affair in Canada) to discuss The Waiting Room via phone and chat about drawing art from life, representing stories of migration, and observing actors.
PM: Pat Mullen
ID: Igor Drljača
PM: I love Jasmin
Geljo’s performance. How did you two develop his character?
ID: I’ve known
him since 2006, but I’ve known of him since I was a kid, and the idea to have
him in a film where I kind of follow him was an idea I had for a second year
documentary class in film school. The idea was to have him go to different
auditions and follow him for two or three months. He was actually away because
he was doing a tour of Audicija, the little skit you see in the film, in
Macedonia and other countries in the former Yugoslav Republic, so he couldn’t
do it for me. So, we left it at that and I hadn’t talked to him for a few
years.
 |
| Jasmin Geljo in The Waiting Room. Courtesy of A71 |
PM: Oh, that’s
nice. That adds a layer to the performance, seeing his work in the film.
ID: Yes. Then, in
2006, I had a role for him in a small film, a short, and he agreed to do it and
then we kept in touch. Then I had had a role for him in my Master’s thesis,
which ended up being Krivina. That’s
where our collaboration went to the next level. We just talked about the alien
representation of cultural workers within Canada or immigrants in drama who
have a very hard time doing what they did back home, so there’s this alienation
they feel more so than those who are involved in other disciplines. I became
fascinated by this man who doesn’t have such a bad time, but he longs for this
country that doesn’t exist, that can’t exist, and he oscillates between wanting
to be in Canada and wanting to go home to Sarajevo, which wouldn’t offer him
too many opportunities, anyway. He would probably go back to theatre or
something like that. But because he’s been out of the game there for a while,
getting his bearings would probably be very difficult.
PM: How so?
ID: I wanted to
create this character that’s partially a fictional character, but it’s inspired
by him. To create somebody that is between these two worlds. Our working
relations essentially revolve around Jasmin telling me stories about his
immigrant experiences, the auditions process, and the types of roles he would
be auditioning for, so some of those ideas informed the scenes for the film and
other stuff was purely fictionalised. The element about the initial arrival,
the wife, and the daughter were fictionalised, but the elements around the
father and son relationship, because they’re really father and son—
PM: I hadn’t
realised that. That’s so interesting!
ID: That stuff is
inspired by Jasmin’s life.
PM: You’ve talked
about how you wanted to make a film that was a character study of “an immigrant
performer” rather than a film about immigration.
ID: It’s both.
It’s performing immigration, but he’s not performing it well.
PM: Ya, well,
he’s getting typecast., so I imagine it’s difficult. I like the scene where
he’s asked to speak “native” and starts sarcastically undercutting the
director. That was funny.
ID: Ya.
PM: And with the
setting, I like how with the composition and the locations, you’re often left
unsure if it’s in Toronto or Bosnia. Was that a conscious choice to blur the
two worlds?
ID: Ya, because
he’s kind of in between places and the idea was to create a space that’s neither/or.
When we see Toronto, it’s this cold, grey mass of concrete, but it isn’t really
like that; it’s in his mind. And this idea of Bosnia being sunny and green,
like we see in the drive itself, that was an attempt to have a character create
a space and then through the creation of that space, we get a glimpse into his
inner struggle, inner process, and inner trauma.
 |
| Courtesy of A71 |
PM: The use of
long takes and lingering shots is very effective in that regard.
ID: Most of my
films use shot duration in a very specific way. We get the tonality of the space,
the textures. But then stuff happens that you would not be able to script, just
in the way that the face breaks down. Studying the face, studying the movement.
I become very involved in the actor’s inner self and just seeing him, the
actor, come through. Like in Krivina,
which was with Jasmin as well but the main character was Goran, having the
camera linger on his movement was a very conscious decision. The inspiration
behind it is through the themes of the film—this sort of melancholy that’s very
difficult to describe, but better expressed through duration-driven approaches.
PM: It gives you
a better feel for the characters. The film also has a strong political
backstory, but it conveys it without having to say a lot. How do you decide how
much to withhold from the audience and how much to reveal?
ID: For people
that are engaged with issues related to that war, they would be able to pick up
on a lot of the nuances. But for the audience that was not from that region, it
was important not to overwhelm them with information about what happened there.
We could say that Jasmin left because there was violence and I think it’s
better to leave it at that. What the violence was, what he saw or didn’t see,
isn’t as important. Even though I think a lot of people, when talking in
English, feel a need to exoticise this place within the dominant language. When
it’s a Bosnia-Herzegovinian story, or Croatian story, they want these visual
metaphors and images that relate to the war and the violence. “The other.” And
this “othering” process was something that I was very conscious of in making the
film. I did not want to play with these easy, safe caricatures in terms of both
the images and the characterisation.
I think for you, it’s easy to spot, but for general
audiences, it’s harder to spot when a Canadian film is taking advantage of locations,
or a locale or a culture and doesn’t entirely understand it, but it still makes
for a very safe and engaging story nonetheless. I did not want to do that,
which might be why the film works for some viewers and not for others. People
often ask why I didn’t show violence, but there’s always your imagination.
PM: The film
often blurs past and present. Does that help with conveying these same things?
ID: It seems like
it has linear narration for the first hour, and then the audience realises that
some things are linear and others are non-linear. It’s almost like an ellipsis.
PM: Yes, this was
the second time I’d seen the film and I’d forgotten, even while watching it
again, that it came around to the beginning with the scene in the car.
ID: This week could
be happening eight times in his life.
 |
| Jasmin Geljo and Cynthia Ashperger in The Waiting Room. Courtesy of A71. |
PM: Now, would
you say The Waiting Room is a ghost
story?
ID: It has those
elements for sure. The daughter is a personification of his internal struggle.
He knew that she could have existed and he created something to make his life
easier, like an internal dialogue that I wanted to have and use this character
that is probably not there, although some people think she is real. Some people
also think that she is not real, but that the story works either way you see
it.
PM: Ya, I think
it works either way. I remember seeing it at TIFF and then discussing it with
someone at a party, and she and I had completely different readings of the
daughter, but both seemed to make sense.
ID: Mmm-hmm, so
that’s why it could have been more obvious, but I left it up to your
interpretation to see how the daughter plays into the narrative. She’s real in
the sense that she existed in some form, but after what happened, she never
became what he thinks she’d be.
PM: Okay, that makes
sense. How do you then balance the tones? Because that story is fairly heavy,
but the film’s also quite funny.
ID: That was very
tough because you’re dealing with a comedian and I think that people going into
the film are anticipating a comedy, or a black comedy at least, and then they
realise that the humour is far and in between. And I did not want it to become
a sad clown story. I needed it to have elements related to the immigrant
experience and the idea of representation. And I think some people’s
interpretation of the character, this sad clown character, is not entirely
followed through enough.
PM: Oh, really?
ID: Through this
tone, my approach was to have the film observe him, more so than engage with
him. That was something I had in my formal outline for the film. It was very
easy to fall in love with Jasmin, and Jasmin tells jokes throughout the film,
but if we were to follow through with that, it would create a sensationalist
approach. He discussed that a lot and he was pushing for that approach, whereas
I resisted. Like in consultations with him on the character, he gave me that
reign to do what I wanted. Ultimately, the impulse for a lot of people would be
to take the sensational approach to reach a bigger audience or to have the film
play to a mainstream crowd.
PM: How’s the
film been playing in different territories?
ID: I think the
film was more positively received in Canada overall, but for the most part the
critics internationally received it well. And whether it be Italy, Germany, Russia,
or anywhere we’ve screened, people have really engaged with it and they really
understood the themes and the idea of representation. I think they see in it
their own culture and their own country, especially in countries with a heavy
immigrant population. In Europe, there’s more awareness of that war. It was in
their backyard, so to speak and they know the legacy of the refugees from the
former Yugoslav territories because they’re still dealing with them and these
refugees have made these countries their homes. This, in conjunction with the
proximity of the space, and the proximity of the war itself, the war wasn’t
that long ago in the minds of Europeans. It had a very melancholic quality that
they might have appreciated it more than North American audiences would. I
talked to people here and they hadn’t heard of the war.
PM: What?
Seriously? Wow.
ID: Yes. In
Canada. They knew there was “something” in Eastern Europe in the 90s, but it
just did not connect that there was a war there.
PM: That’s crazy.
ID: But that also
made it really interesting for discussing the film. A lot of discussions were
framed around why we didn’t show violence or easy images.
PM: I think it
helps by giving a sense of how one person experienced it.
ID: If you’ve
seen Krivina, the idea with this
“migrants trilogy” is to have another film and close this chapter with one of
the characters from The Waiting Room,
I’m not going to say who, as the primary character and end it. The script’s
ready and we’re just going through the financing stage.
PM: Well, I hope
this film helps get the money rolling for that one!
ID: We’ll see.
But that’s easier said than done. [Laughs.]
The Waiting Room opens in Toronto on Friday, June 3 at TIFF Bell Lightbox.
Read the Cinemablographer review of The Waiting Room here.
