An Interview with the Crucible of War Team
(Director Leon Gerskovic,
Producer Erica Ginsberg,
and Co-Producer Rob Shire)
December 2000
Q: You all seem to come from very different backgrounds. Leon, you’re Croatian. Rob and Erica, you’re American. Leon and Rob you have a background in the technical side of video production. Erica, you have an international affairs background. How did you all come together to do this project?
Rob: It started with a woman. A woman I had been dating. She told me about a friend of hers who had a digital video camera. That was Leon. At that time, I’d been working as a soundman for six or seven years and was just very fed up with the work situation. This was right around the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. I sort of saw corporate media for what it really is and was very interested in doing a more creative documentary. So the meeting with Leon was serendipitous. We ended up working together on a short fiction film he directed called Sufis. A year later, we were sitting in a theater at Montgomery College [in Rockville, Maryland] watching The Last Days. And I think that's what gave Leon the idea to do Crucible of War.
Leon: Yes. The Last Days really influenced me. It was really amazing to find out how the stories of people really could touch you in some strange way. Just a regular story not being cut up into soundbites and not being made to explain why it happened. Just to tell the stories of people. You could see that every experience is bad in its own way or good in its own way. Once you find the stories that really matter, people could get connected to the stories. They could really feel the stories. After the screening, I talked more with Rob about my idea of going back to the Balkans to record stories and asked him if he would go with me.
Rob: I was excited about the idea, but also a bit nervous. Up until then, I didn't even have a passport and here this guy was asking me to go to the middle of a warzone. Kosovo was going on at the time and I assumed everywhere would be pretty much like what I was seeing on the news.
Leon: But I did convince Rob. Even though I knew that he had a lot of experience on the technical side, I wanted to find someone else to help out with the producing. That's where Erica came in.
Erica: I was working on a fundraiser to raise money for the Red Cross in Kosovo. And the event needed a videographer. I put the request out to everyone I knew, every listserv I was on. Ironically, Leon found about the job from Rob's ex-girlfriend, the same woman who introduced the two of them. So I met Leon at this fundraiser. He told me about his idea and even shared with me a treatment. I read it on the way home and contacted him the next day with some ideas.
Leon: I was pretty surprised when Erica followed up with me. If I had been given that piece of messy piece of paper – seeing what we wrote and what were our ideas – I would never have accepted it. But she seemed to be truly interested in our proposal and saw the potential in it, even though it wasn’t written too well.
Q: So basically you came on board even though you didn't know Leon at all?
Erica: Sounds crazy. But it just seemed to be the right time to do something. I didn’t have years of news and corporate experience like Rob. My background was in international affairs. I had recently completed a master's degree in film and video and was looking for a way to combine my interests. Leon's idea, in particular, really touched me. Through my work, I knew a lot of people from former Yugoslavia. People who still had family in the region, including Albanians whose family members were among those thousands of refugees and Serbs whose families were living in basement shelters during the NATO bombings. So I had a personal connection to what was going on there. A few weeks before I met Leon, I had been in the hospital, recovering from some minor surgery. It happened to be the same day that the NATO bombings of Serbia over what was going on in Kosovo. I just remember lying in bed and I couldn’t sleep. So I started watching CNN. I think I must have dropped the remote and was in too much pain to reach over and pick it up. So I was pretty much trapped, watching the same CNN images over and over again. It made me feel so hopeless. When I saw what Leon wanted to do, it made me feel it was the least I could do to help these people by helping to tell their stories.
Q: Now Leon, you are the only one who is actually from that part of the world. This must have been most personal for you. What got you interested in this project?
Leon: Primarily the restlessness of being an observer rather than being actively involved in the things that were shaping that whole region and people in the region. And just the feeling that lots of Americans have not had a chance to see stories that are much more relevant. About people living their everyday lives.
We had some ideas that we wanted to get some stories and we didn’t want to get regular stories that every news crew was getting there. But we didn’t have an idea of what actually we were going to get. So, in that sense, we had an open mind. And we said, "Let’s go and see what we will be able to get."
Q: So, it must have evolved a lot while you were on the ground?
Rob: It started out as a visionary project. The original idea was very ambitious: to visit every republic that surrounded Kosovo to explore people’s feelings and to see them as things were happening and after things had happened as well as to see the potential for things to happen. We wanted to see how tensions exist before there is conflict.
Erica: We had originally hoped to film in Macedonia, Montenegro, and Albania, but we realized along the way that a lot of what was happening in Kosovo was too fresh, too immediate. It made more sense to look at what had happened in Bosnia and Croatia, and parts of Serbia as an idea of what the future would hold. We could talk to people who had already had a few years distance from the immediate impact of war.
This was really a very non-traditional approach to a documentary in the sense that, even though we had a plan in terms of what we wanted, Leon and Rob didn’t go there with every interview set and a schedule of where they would be on Day 4 and 12. A lot of it was planning as they went and finding these amazing people who would lead them to other people.
Q: Rob, you were actually on location in a place where you didn’t speak the language. This was your first trip abroad. Did that make it more of a challenge or did it make it easier?
Rob: When I was there, my job changed. My job was to be a cinematographer. I left the producing to Leon. I mean we did make decisions together about what do we do this day and that day. But, after those discussions were done at the dinner table, it was pretty much my job to check the gear and make sure the batteries are ready for another day’s shoot. The objectivity that Leon spoke about really was the approach and I wanted to be honest to the approach. I think it worked because of that.
Leon: Since Rob didn’t understand the language and wasn’t able to communicate with the subjects, he could remain objective behind the lens about how he was going to tell the story through the images themselves rather than just through what the people were talking about. Now, of course, that could also make things more difficult, because he wouldn’t known necessarily when somebody was being very expressive with their emotions. But it was also a plus because he was able to catch certain visual things that I would have overlooked because I was so involved with the subjects.
Rob: At times, I was asking myself why I was shooting all these destroyed houses. It became more apparent later after I got home and it really sunk in that housing was such a huge issue there. And I’m speaking of Bosnia in particular. How houses get rebuilt and why houses were destroyed in the first place. You’ll see a perfectly untouched house next to one that’s destroyed. And we talked to people who explained the politics behind the housing crisis for refugees. It paints a very different picture than what was put on paper in Dayton or has been covered in the news.
Leon: News tends to be based on the 24-hour clock. There are so many stories that aren’t considered newsworthy just because they are old. Bosnia is Yesterday. Kosovo is the Soup d’Jour. But if the public shapes their opinions according to what they see on TV news, they get a very soundsbitey picture of things which are going on. And they tend to get disassociated from the real conflict and the deeper issues.
Rob: That is something that we all recognized and it’s what drove us into this project. I recognized it very much during Monica Lewinsky and was driven into documentary work when I saw it there. How there was a treatment of news being day-to-day. The story was in the day. And you never got any perspective of the other sides of it. It became very personal for Leon when it dealt with the region he’s from and the people he can identify with.
Erica: I think that’s what makes documentary different from news. The first thing you learn in news reporting is to tell the Who-What-Where-and-When. Documentary goes beyond that and gets deeper into the "Why" and the "How." The question that all of the people we interviewed consistently wonder aloud is "Why did this happen to us?" And, while we didn’t even begin to try to answer the question of why the war started, we did want to explore why people can go through very similar wartime experiences and come out of them with completely different conclusions about life. And we wanted to do this through very personal reflections.
As opposed to journalism, which theoretically is about finding the absolute truth, we were interested in documenting individual versions of the truth. We took everyone we interviewed at face value. Whether you agree with them or not, what they convey is their own personal reality. Their humanity.
Q: It certainly seems like you made a huge effort to tell stories from different sides – in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia. And you have said you took an objective approach. But could you be truly objective? Leon, you were actually in Croatia at the start of the war. You must have felt very strongly about what went on there. Can you be truly objective as a documentarian making a film about the Balkans?
Leon: I don’t think any documentarian can be truly objective, especially when it comes to personal stories. You are documenting the things that you see, the things that you experience. At the same time, you can say that objectivity really lies in the approach that we took. We really went about in a random way. Since we had no pre-arranged interviews, our view of the people and the situation could be as objective as anyone going there at that point and meeting 15 people in that region. You can end up seeing somebody who is really good and goes through very wonderful phases of their life and has a positive outlook on the future. And you meet someone else down the road who can be completely negative and have negative emotions and have the weight of the world on their shoulders.
Rob: And it really turned out that, once we were there, it became totally objective because people were allowed to speak about whatever they felt was important to them. Their story. The people that we found were almost by accident sometimes. I think that that is really the strength of what we’ve done. I know that a scientist out in the bush wants to analyze the jungle or the forest by cutting a straight line through the jungle. Our idea was to cut a straight line through the populace. The different classes, the different people. To get as many ethnic groups, as many religious groups as possible. All the different strata of society. Rich. Poor. Peasant. Educated. The more that we could do that, the more we were being objective.
Q: Now, while the two of you were out shooting, Erica was back in Washington. How was that for you?
Erica: It was an interesting experience because I had never been involved in a production before where I wasn’t actually on site for the production. I was manning the fort back in Washington and keeping in touch with e-mails and phone calls in the middle of the night. While Leon and Rob were there, I was also gathering potential contacts for them. So I would say, "So and so says you should really call this guy when you get to Sarajevo."
Sometimes it was frustrating to know that I wasn’t there and I needed to keep things organized here without always being aware of what was going on. I know there were a couple of mishaps with the "Lost Cellphone Incident" and a couple other times where we fell out of communication for awhile.
For me, it was as much a discovery as it was for them on the ground. Every time I got a phone call, even though they usually woke me up and I was groggy and making illegible notes, I was always excited to hear what was going. But nothing compared to seeing the first footage. I think Rob got back first. It was just incredible. Even though I don’t speak the language either, just to see all this stuff we’d been preparing for. They spent five weeks shooting and then to finally see the footage. Even more wonderful was having the chance to meet a few of the subjects after that here in the States. Seeing them made it even more real. Video is half the reality. But to meet them and see them in flesh and blood, when the guys had met them and I never had, it was exciting.
Q: You worked with digital video?
Leon: We shot with three cameras. In Bosnia and Croatia, we used Sony DVCAM and DV. Our crew in Serbia used Sony DVCAM in PAL format. Almost everything was shot with natural light.
Q: Why this format?
Leon: Partially for economic reasons. We could travel with just ourselves for a crew and use relatively inexpensive but still broadcast-quality cameras. Partially for convenience of movement. These are lightweight cameras and we could haul them around much more easily than we ever could have with film or Betacam recorders. But mostly because we couldn’t have gotten the interviews without them. It took a lot to get some of these people to open up to us and we couldn’t possibly have done that with larger, more obtrusive cameras or situations where we would have to keep interrupting the flow of the interview to change tape.
Q: We’ve talked a lot about the approach and the process. But the film is about people. Tell me about some of the people.
Rob: I had my own impressions of people. It was hard to communicate obviously. I don’t know the language. I can tell you about one day and person in particular. It was on one of our hardest days of production. We had traveled a long way and were worried about running out of money. We were stuck too long in Brcko, Bosnia and were headed towards Osijek, Croatia. But that was delayed because of a farmer’s strike. By the time we finally got to Osijek, we felt like we were a little under the gun and we needed to get some more stories. The first things that we shot that day just weren’t that good.
Eventually we wound up in a place that we never imagined we’d be in. Vukovar. In the middle of a former army barracks on the outskirts of town, we run into a group of young photographers. Most were Bosnian, but one of the teachers was from Baltimore. That was incredible to me because I didn’t expect to travel half way around the world to find someone from home. I made a connection with somebody and I also knew why he was there. Because, at that moment, I wasn’t sure why I was there.
It’s hard now to talk about individual people but I can tell you about the place and the feelings and the emotions. It’s a wonderfully mystical place. This region. I got a sense there that there’s timelessness in the places and the people and in the emotions that I feel. There’s a deep spiritual connection with the land and the people that I had never experienced before in my life. And that was very powerful.
In contrast, my experience in Zagreb, Croatia was very different. It didn’t seem as connected and there was a certain chill in the air. At that time, I wasn’t aware of the oppression under the Tudjman regime and the way that Croatia had roughed it out there alone. They won their war, but not a lot of people were coming in and saying, "Congratulations!" I had no idea about Croatia’s past either. Somehow you get some feeling that it’s all there and still seething under the surface.
Leon: Rob touched on something that is very close to me at least. That is the feeling that you get going back home. For me it’s home. Going back to that land. It’s so difficult also because people here don’t understand how people can be connected to a piece of land. Or how they could be connected to that culture. Or their house. Or anything that doesn’t haven’t any value except being there and being part of that culture.
From the moment I arrived, I was looking forward to going back and talking to people and feeling those feelings once again. At the same time, I was a bit scared. Would I be able to translate those feelings Rob is talking about onto tape? Because it’s so untouchable. It is there. It is feelings. It is emotions. It’s something that can not be very easily expressed. So the job was really very difficult in that aspect.
It was even more difficult when we actually had to talk to the people and try to find ways of approaching them in such a way that they would be comfortable in expressing those emotions and those feelings and those deep roots that they have and why they feel towards the land the way they do feel. I think the documentary itself was able to translate those feelings on to tape. Especially in the interviews we got my sheer chance.
For instance, those farmers who were blocking the road to protest agricultural economic policies. Just getting there at 4:00 in the morning, we decided to see what was going on. Why were those people blocking the roads? We saw that they are sleeping in the tractors and they are getting up and they are really very involved and very passionate about the cause that they have. It got to the point where they started pushing each other out of the view of the camera so each one could be able to tell his story. Then we saw how much those people wanted to express what they feel. How much they wanted to say what’s on their mind. How much they wanted other people to listen. This was an opportunity for r others to know what’s really going on. How they are surviving. How they are living. In those instances, we could really be observers.
Rob: We were cathartic to these people. They had been searching for us while we were out there looking for them. And we got that feeling repeatedly from people. There is something that goes through the human psyche after someone’s been through war. These were not people with animosity. These were not people with hatred towards everyone. We were always treated warmly. People who had suffered greatly from post-stress syndrome. You almost immediately saw the human element within them.
Q: That may be true, but the fact is that these were people who engaged in one of the bloodiest conflicts in the second part of the 20th century. I think some critics might argue that perhaps you are trying to humanize a culture of hatred too much. What would you say to that?
Rob: I would say that that’s an erroneous statement in that the situations that evolved there could evolve anywhere. A lot of what happened there was political and manipulated by those who had political power, including criminal elements of society that were out to get more power. Are you asking if we are legitimizing this culture of hatred?
Q: In a sense, some people might see your project as somehow softening it. You’re talking to all these people who are wondering, "How could this have happened? Why did this happen to us?" And yet are they truly representative of the full society? Maybe the people you found were warm and friendly. But obviously somebody was killing somebody.
Rob: I think anyone who watches our film should come into it with an open mind. We can’t be representative of all of society. We’re not trying to do that. We interviewed so many different people. The only thing common to the people we interviewed was that these are people who lived through a war. They survived.
As they went through whatever they went through, something happened to them. Either they become less human or more human. But there’s always something that remains. That’s feeling. And that’s what we saw happening. That’s what we got from those people: "Look at this one last thing that I can show you. That I want to show you. You’re not a television crew coming here to get stories of the war and stories of hatred. I see that. You’re here so we can be human. Let’s be human."
Leon: I think that is one of the problems with the way the mainstream media has covered the Balkans. I think what most Americans come away with is that this is a land of so many conflicts and so many different nationalities and so much historical turmoil. I would use an analogy with the weather system. What most of the news does is try to predict what the weather will be. They show you computer models of how the weather patterns are moving and which breezes are moving from which side, and so on.
What we did was bypass the weather predictions which were looking at the weather from above. We went on the street and actually looked up at the sky and said, "Oh, it’s raining right now. Let’s look to see who is carrying an umbrella. Who is wearing a raincoat?" Because that is something that we keep forgetting. We are just looking at such global aspects and looking at history and looking at politics. And those are the things which cause the event to happen. They cause the rain or the snow. But we wanted to see the effects. What are the things that happen on the ground after the storm? What are the interactions between people? How did neighbors help each other during the snowstorms? A human side to the whole, big weather system.
Q: Do you see yourselves as activist filmmakers?
Rob: I don’t personally. If you look at some of the other projects I’ve been involved with and some of the other things I want to do, it’s pretty clear that activism is not my focus. Having said that, I think that the role of an activist filmmaker is necessary in today’s society even more than in the past.
Erica: I wouldn’t consider myself an activist filmmaker in the sense of politics. I’m not interested in making films with a political point of view that I want to promote. However, I do consider this film a very activist film if it can get people more interested in a part of the world that they may have tuned out or don’t think is relevant to them. It’s not a question of saying that this group is right and that group is wrong, but just that you need to open your eyes and understand that what happened there could just as easily happen here.
Leon: Any artist is an activist in a certain sense. Activism on a personal level or on another level. My ultimate goal is to raise awareness. People can do that in many different ways with different tools. The job of the filmmaker is to make people aware of different things. Things that are not ordinary. That you don’t see every day. Or even things that are so ordinary that you normally overlook them. It is just a different point of a view. If that is activism – raising awareness – then I am an activist.
Q: You are all young, independent filmmakers. There are a lot of them in this world. Yet most seem to be drawn to fiction filmmaking. Why documentary?
Rob: Sometimes I wonder that too. I often joke that I may never do another documentary after this is all over because, with fiction, it’s easier. You can really say exactly what you want to say.
Erica: I disagree. I feel with fiction you always have this illusion that you’re in control because you can write it, you can storyboard it, you can do multiple takes, you can do all these things. But really there’s so many things that can go wrong and you have adjust this and adjust that and you’re never fully satisfied that what you had on paper is the same thing on screen. With documentary, you don’t start with that illusion. You still are directing. You have still have an idea of the direction you want it to go. But you start out in a slightly more relaxed state because you know that it will sort of unfold and that it’s all really going to come together at the end when you are in post-production. Less room for disappointment.
I think that’s my approach to documentary filmmaking in general. You need to have a sense of curiosity. There’s no point in making a documentary where you already know the answer to every question and you’re just trying to get the people you interview and the whole way you edit it to conform to what you already believe and what you want to express to everyone else.
Leon: It’s a learning experience. It’s really important for filmmakers to be as well rounded as possible. Knowledgeable about things that are going on. You don’t even have to be particularly knowledgeable about people who you are going to film, but you have to be able to translate their experiences. And that requires a broad knowledge.
Erica: And I think that that comes through. I think if the filmmakers themselves are curious and educated, but without thinking they have all the answers, the results are much more interesting. It will all come together in the editing room even though I know that will be especially hard for Leon and Rob since they were there for every shoot. At a certain point, it is hard to take over 40 hours of footage and decide what stays in and what goes out. These are human beings and one of the purposes of our project is to maintain the integrity of their stories and let them each tell their stories. To still do that in the framework of an hour-long film is a challenge.
Rob: I have always contended from the start, this film will be made in the only way it can be made and that it wants to be made. I don’t know why I keep saying that other than that there are a lot of principles that we adhered to and applied. I think that’s what good filmmaking is about. When you stick to those things, the story will tell itself.
Leon: I think the hardest part of getting back home was deciding how to cut it. Although I do share Rob’s belief that it will shine a light through a dark window and we will be able to see how everything will be finished. But the saddest part is when you see those 15 interviews that we got and knowing that their story at the time it was being told to us seemed the most important thing in the world for other people to hear. And then, for us to make a judgment and a decision that part of the story won’t be able to make it.
Rob: But we’ll get there.
Erica: And that’s why we decided to do this as a multi-media project. We didn’t see the point in just doing a website to promote the film. We wanted the website to take up where the film leaves off. To have another resource for the historical context. To give a chance for the stories that aren’t in the film to be seen. And to give people throughout the world the opportunity to add their own stories. So the story doesn’t end when the credits roll in the film.
Q: It sounds like you all have very different views on filmmaking.
Leon: No question, yes. We have three completely different points of view on everything from filmmaking to life in general. But I think that is our strength rather than our weakness. In many instances it has happened that our disagreements brings a new way of thinking into the project. If we all agreed all the time, this project would have been completed a long time ago maybe…
Erica: But done badly.
Leon: Yes. Maybe not done with the different perspectives that we have at this point.
Rob: I like to think of our relationship as a three-legged stool. If you chopped off one of those legs, it would fall over.
Q: So you each bring something different to the table?
Rob: Yes and that’s how these things flourish.
Leon: In general, I think it’s very good experience in the sense of seeing how many different things you can learn from a single project. Not only from the production point of view where you see all the subjects and you talk to them and get all this information from them. But looking at human relationships, whether they are on screen or among us. And just looking at how we could do more with less. That is one thing we can all agree on. When you think about how much money was spent on this project and what we did with how much we had, I think it is an amazing accomplishment in itself.
Erica: Or really how much money wasn’t spent. That’s one thing where I think our different styles and backgrounds have helped. Filmmaking in general is about communicating. I think that’s something we’ve all done and we have our own network of friends and colleagues. We have had so many people who have given so much to this project just because they are interested in people hearing these stories. They don’t want money. They don’t want fame. They just want to make sure that these stories get told.
Leon: You have to believe in it. Just to know that there is somebody out there who is willing to watch what you did and that there is an audience there who actually would like to see what are you doing at this point. It’s the greatest drive you can have as an independent filmmaker. Because if you start following the rules and going down the road that was drawn for you to follow in order to get to the point where your film is going to be shown, it is much more difficult than doing it by yourself and figuring a way to do it with the belief that somebody someday will be able to see it.
Q: But surely it must be a difficult road for a group of first-time filmmakers with very little track record?
Erica: I think this whole issue about being "first-time filmmakers with no proven track record" is a misnomer. What is considered a track-record? If the question is, "Have you done ten long-form documentaries that are international on a very similar theme?" well no, then we don’t have a track record. But if it’s a question of "Do we have life experience and experience in this media, that is a track record?" We saved a lot of money by having two producers who could also shoot and do sound. In my personal experience, just having a background in international relations brought a lot to this project since it gave us some additional contacts we might not have had otherwise. I think it’s hard to really pigeon-hole us.
And it is quite likely that if we were those people with ten films done in various continents, then it wouldn’t be this film. It wouldn’t have been made. Because we went into this with a feeling of "we have nothing to lose." OK, maybe several thousand dollars and some time. But the fact is we didn’t sit there and write proposals for production grants and wait for people to use our lack of a body of work as an excuse not to fund us. We went out and shot it with the idea of getting funding once we had something to show.
Rob: Which brings out the great lie which is the fact that money was coming any day when we over there in production.
Leon: I think that was the best lie. (Laughs) Whoever told us that, it made us work harder.
Erica: That was me. That was the only thing we kept communicating. Every time, you guys called, I would say, "Yeah, the money’s coming. The money’s coming."
Rob: You sometimes have to believe stuff like that. What if I had said at the onset that I couldn’t have come with Leon? Would he have done it?
Leon: I don’t know. I don’t think so. It would be much harder definitely. I cannot think backwards because it happened the way it did happen. There was a reason for that. I look at the things that happened as having a reason. Because there was a reason that they happened, we need to continue in order to justify the reasons. We just have to keep going forward. There is no turning backwards. And that is the only way to become a second-time filmmaker. If you have determination and this force within you to keep pushing the project and to get it completed, one day that project will be seen on TV, at festivals, and in the classroom. And that will give us the determination to do the next project. That’s what it’s all about.
Rob: This has always been an issue with me as well. At some point after I had been working for awhile and established myself, I thought that what I wanted to do more than anything was to help first-time filmmakers with projects that should be made. I felt this was a responsibility for someone like me. It’s something that needs to be done almost like a millionaire or billionaire needs to be philanthropic. You just do it.
Erica: So if there are any millionaires out there who are feeling especially philanthropic today, you can contact us at info@crucibleofwar.com
Q: So what do you hope to achieve with this film?
Leon: The biggest achievement would be for as many people as possible to see this film. Our objective is to use this documentary as a tool to show people their counterparts in a different land. We hope there will be some connections, that people will be able to draw some connections. That people will be able to learn something from that. Either to use it in their everyday life or maybe just reflect on what they have in their life at this point and what other people don’t have. Just to be a reflection tool, a mirror image of something that could happen somewhere else. How conflicts happen and how people respond to them.
Erica: A lot of times, we are asked to sum up the documentary in one sentence. A lot of times, we do it in a run-on sentence. But if I had to summarize Crucible of War, it gives us a glimpse of a people that we think we know and yet we learn more about ourselves after hearing what they have to say.