| Interview with Svetozar Cvetkovic.
- adapted and translated from Serbian by this website. Svetozar Cvetkovic and director Milos (Misa) Radivojevic have recently finished shooting another film together in which Svetozar is both actor and producer. The Film, How I was Stolen by the Germans will be shown in late spring at various film festivals. What distinguishes this new film 'How I was stolen by the Germans “from the earlier films that you have made with Misa? This film took a very long time to prepare. It is the view of Misa’s childhood, an autobiographical film, which is rare in cinema. There are many autobiographical novels and stories, but rarely is it that the director dares to enter into his roots by making an autobiographical film, and then builds and elaborates on it. Misa devised the idea more than fifteen years ago. He was helped by co-writers Vladislav Vojinovic and Svetozar Vlajkovic and thanks to them, the script for this film came together four years ago. Did you find many difficulties in the production of this work? The financial side was a challenge, as was the artistic side. This is Misa Radivojevic's, sixteenth feature film with Purisa Djordjevic. None of these films have earnt a huge amount of money, but they were all award-winning films. So you should pay attention to the personal, romantic, emotional and humorous story that carries this film, which takes place between 1941 and 1944 in the province, and sets a question mark in front of our occupying German soldiers, members of the Third Reich. How is the German officer shown in this film? In this film the German is a chief officer, in a small town in the Serbian province, who accepts a three-year boy as his son and behaves towards him as his natural father. It is a story about the childhood of Misa Radivojevic, from which he continues to build a story through time up to the beginning of the nineties, when the boy, now in his fiftieth year finds happiness with a girl who was orphaned from the war of the nineties ... Who plays the German officer in the film? The German officer is played by Scottish actor Douglas Henshall. I came into contact with him in England, and he agreed to something called the local conditions. He is excellent at speaking German in the film and spoke both German and English with a German accent. I have to say that the German actors would not agree to play the role unless they had favourable conditions, and Douglas told us that this is the best role that he has ever been offered and would not place any special conditions. The only thing he wanted to do was to spend 15 days in Berlin before shooting the film. There he spoke with German colleagues and was able to come well prepared for the three-week shooting in Valjevo. How would you describe the character you play in the film? In a way, I am a reflection of the author, and because I am playing Misa in the film, it is always more than just the interpretation of a character. I play the boy after 1943 facing the fate of a country that is falling apart, through the attempt to take a young girl from his house to an orphanage. Do you meet up with your wife in a film sequence, and how did you choose the cast? Jelena (Djokic) was filmed entirely in the second part of the film, which is set in the forties, and I recorded the film set in the Nineties, so we have not met directly in the frame except in one isolated variation of a scene which Misa wanted to achieve. As for the rest of the cast, Misa and I chose them together. We also have Dara Dzokic, Miki Krstovic, Nenad Ciric, peg, Nesa Milovanovic, Nada Sargin ... When will the movie come out of post-production? A team of sixty people are doing most of the work, and what we are hoping for, what we are doing currently, is to have the film ready by the end of spring, because then we can show it at the public festival. Wherever we appeared during filming, everyone was fascinated by the story of the relationship between an occupying army officer and the boy from the country that was occupied. How did you become a favourite actor of Milos Radivojevic? We met when we were working on the film Ni na nebu ni na zemlji (Not In Heaven or on earth) in 1993, a film that saw incredible commercial success in those worst years of destitution. Today we have become not only friends, but also very creative friends. It was similar when we worked together on other films, Budenje iz Mrtvih“(Awakening from the Dead )and “Odbaceni "(Reject ), which I also produced and played in. Source : B92 - January 5th 2010 |