The Bosnian war, the focus of Angelina Jolie’s directional debut which premiers in American theaters this Christmas, has left heavy memories in the regional history that the production team were mindful to be receptive of and draw on for the movie In the Land of Blood and Honey.

During the war, men and women were often separated and families were split. Many Bosnians of all ethnicities left the country; others were taken into captivity and abused. In one town, Srebrenica, Bosnian Serb forces massacred more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys. Throughout the war, as many as 20,000 to 50,000 women were raped, many while in captivity.

In response, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia would eventually indict 161 persons of all ethnicities for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide during the Bosnian War and would become the first tribunal to prosecute rape as an independent crime against humanity.

The last remaining fugitive from the ICTY was captured in July 2011, and 35 cases remain pending as of November 2011. Decisive military intervention by NATO and intense diplomatic pressure eventually led to a cease fire and the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. Since then, an uneasy peace has prevailed in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but divisions created by the conflict remain, and the struggle for reconciliation continues.

One could argue that the very existence of In the Land of Blood and Honey — a film in which Serbian, Bosnian Serb, Bosnian Muslim, and Croatian Serb actors all worked together in a spirit of community and familial spirit — offers a rejoinder to what the war represented, namely ethno-religious division and strife.

Creating that sense of harmony worried Jolie at the outset, but after the first day of shooting, she witnessed a powerful and heartening moment. “The very first scene we shot was one of the heaviest in the film. It’s the scene when the women are taken off the bus and brought into the school. That was our first scene! I woke up that morning terrified, but you have to tell yourself to get past that fear.

“It was a lot on the first day. That scene remains one of the most emotional moments in the film. It was the first time that these actors had come together in a scene. The men are pulling the women off the bus. Nobody knew each other. The male soldiers were mostly played by Serbians and Bosnian Serbs, and the main women were all played by Bosnians.

The women didn’t know the men who were ripping their jewelry and coats off of them. Then we went into the rape scene. It was so emotionally heavy that it was going to do one of two things: It would either put us in a really bad place, or it would pull everyone together to focus on what this film was about.

It would pull us into a certain reality. Everyone was going to bond, because if we can make it through this day, we can make it through anything. But after lunchtime, I saw two women hugging each other. When I called ‘cut’ the first time, the man playing the soldier who rapes the woman, hugged the actress playing the victim to make sure she was OK.

All of the guys who had ripped the coats and jewelry off the women then immediately picked the coats and jewelry off of the ground and re-dressed the women themselves. Wardrobe didn’t do it—they did it. That was the beginning. That morning, looking at what had to be done and what had to be asked of people who were on opposite sides of this conflict, to ask them to come together and do this together—it was incredible.”

The making of In the Land of Blood and Honey suggests that healing is possible, and that it’s necessary to remind the world of the dangers of ethnocentric and nationalistic ideology. Goran Kostic, who plays Danijel, hopes the film will be a force for good. “I hope that this will be one of those strong pillars of understanding of what happened then,” Kostić says.

“These stories have to be re-told again and again. A younger generation doesn’t know what happened. If we do not revisit these events, things won’t change. These events get forgotten, accepted. It’s important for these stories to be re-told every three, five, or seven years, and in the harshest ways possible.

We must remind the younger generations about things that have gone on before. This way, when we say, ‘Never again,’ we know what ‘never again’ really means. If one person is able to forgive because of this film, or if 10 kids in the future understand something in a positive way about this period of our history, then that is truly a success.”

For Angelina Jolie, the success of the film belongs to those who helped make it, those who lived through and survived this terrible event. “It’s less about what I accomplished, and more about what the cast accomplished by making this project together. That message of unity and desire for a peaceful future the cast sends is what will make the biggest difference.”

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In the Land of Blood and Honey is the dramatic story of two lives, brought together only to be torn apart in the brutal realities of the Bosnian War. Angelina Jolie, Oscar-winning actress and Icon, is behind the camera for the first time. In the movie’s production notes, Jolie and the cast explains the journey they took to realize the full potential of In the Land of Blood and Honey.

Jolie recognized that the different emotions involved with each character’s relationships would require different approaches. “Rade and Goran tended to rehearse,” she recalls. “They wanted to rehearse. They had met and discussed it, and it was their way. That was fine with me. I felt that as they spent time together, and the more they got to know each other, play together, the more familiar they would be.

It wasn’t extensive, but it was the method.” Kostić felt that familial kinship as soon as he and Šerbedžija began working together. “He’s such a huge actor with this enormous body of work. I felt this father-son relationship immediately when I met Rade. I felt this great respect for him. We would spend an hour rehearsing before we would shoot a scene. I’ve worked with a lot of actors of that generation, and they never rehearse. Rade’s different.”

“With Zana and Goran, however, we didn’t rehearse,” says Jolie. “We wanted them to surprise each other. So often, one of them would have information the other one didn’t have. They could have the ability to be really looking at each other for information. We wanted that chess game to always exist between them.

I never encouraged them to be too comfortable with each other. You wanted them to keep a bit of distance so that they weren’t sure.” Kostić felt similarly. “I don’t really want to know what Ajla is thinking or feeling when Danijel is not there,” he says. “It gave our relationship a dynamic.

I knew what Ajla was saying to Danijel, but beyond that…The more we got into it, the more strongly we felt this trust as actors. We were trusted.” That trust was felt strongly by Marjanović as well. “The three of us—me, Goran, Angelina—worked as a team. From day one, it felt like we knew each other for a long time, that we were really good friends. As with any film, you have to feel the trust from your partner. This trust between us was never broken. Once you have that, everything can run smoothly.”

An important example for Jolie became the scene where Danijel discovers that Ajla has been raped. “In that scene, I knew that as an actor, if I was forced to do that in pieces and for too long, it would drain me and I would start to be conscious of my behavior; it would be very painful and not as organic.

We made sure that everything was ready on that day, that the cameras and lights were set, so that Goran and Zana were able to do it all in one go. There’s a cut in the edit, but we did shoot it all in one take. I came in and told them, ‘We’re gonna do this hopefully two times, and hopefully that will be it.

I know that it’s cold, and it will be very difficult, but if you can get into it, feel it, and give me everything you’ve got, I will not make you do this 30 times. It’ll be our job to come to you, to move around you, to sculpt it with the camera and the editing. But right now, give me everything you’ve got.’ We pushed through that morning, and it was a very physically and emotionally challenging morning for both of them. But then it was done.”

Location shooting occurred in Budapest, Hungary. “We wanted to shoot in Sarajevo, but the city doesn’t look like it did then,” says Jolie. “None of Bosnia really does, with the exception of a few pockmarked buildings, because—fortunately—it’s physically recovered. Budapest had a lot of empty space to shoot, and the architecture and landscape looked very similar.

At the time we shot our film, they opened a studio. It was a great place to shoot. But it was important to include shots that were genuinely of the area. There were a few days shot in Bosnia, like in the opening of the film—a lot of wide shots and plate shots. We needed to bring in the beauty of the country, the real landscape.”

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As a first-time director, Hollywood star Angelina Jolie wanted great talent on the crew for her upcoming movie In the Land of Blood and Honey, who could create a comfortable working environment. “I wanted good people around this cast and this subject matter,” she says. “I wanted people with heart who wanted to do this for the right reasons.”

The first step was to find the producer who would nurture the project as closely as she would, and for Jolie, that was Graham King. “I don’t think anybody else would’ve done it beside Graham,” she says. “It’s a famously unpopular subject matter, especially with film. Financially, it’s not been a lucrative subject matter for producers.

I chose Graham because I’d worked with him before. He’s a very direct, no-nonsense person and I knew he’d just tell it to me straight. We would go head-to-head. If we had to fight something out, we’d come to a conclusion together. There wouldn’t be 30 executives to please.”

One of the first crew members she approached was her DP, Dean Semler. Australian by birth, Semler has built an impressive résumé in Hollywood, winning an Academy Award in 1991 for lensing Dances with Wolves. Jolie worked with Semler on The Bone Collector, and the two had remained close.

“I wrote to him, asking if he’d read the script and if he would recommend people I could call for this,” Jolie recalls. “I assumed he’d just give me a list of names that would be good for the film. But then he said, ‘I’ll do it.’ I couldn’t believe it.” Getting the look right was of paramount importance—a way of maintaining authenticity.

“Angie showed me a lot of photographs as references,” Semler recalls. “It was very inspiring to see how she wanted the film to look. She knows what she wants and will tell me exactly how she wants it to look.” Jolie knew that Semler’s highly versatile talent would be able to pull off the right balancing act between beauty and destruction.

“He’s so talented that you could look at a few of his films and none would look quite like the other,” she says. “Dean has such a confidence and ease. I knew that he would make it beautiful without making it so beautiful that it became poetic and not real. I knew that he would capture something that would have elegance to it, but not so overdone that you would become distracted by the photography.

It had to have beauty in it, though. We talked a lot about the fact that there was no electricity during the war. We had to work a lot with a single bulb, or windows—single light sources. We drew on Vermeer and Rembrandt, anything that we could think of that would bring us around to the challenges of lack of light.

It’s not a very expensive film, but the way he shot the film makes it look like it cost much more than it did.” Jolie had recently worked with production designer Jon Hutman on The Tourist, a film that had a very different approach to set design. But she knew that their working relationship would be right for In the Land of Blood and Honey.

“He’d never done a war film,” Jolie says, “and suddenly he was in rubble. We’d just come off The Tourist where everything was beautiful, and here he is in mud! He was so great to work with.” Costume designer Gabriele Binder brought a keen eye toward the authenticity of the period and of the location, something that Jolie greatly appreciated.

“I think one of the most misunderstood things about filmmaking is costuming,” Jolie says. “People often get acknowledged for great wardrobe for a period piece or some extreme drama, something that really stands out to the eye. But I think the hardest thing to do, hands down, is to make something look real.”

Binder agrees. “We tried to come close to the people who lived through the war, to their reality,” she says. “She understood the colors of that time, of 1990s Yugoslavia,” Jolie says. “We picked colors for each character that are so subtle you might not even notice.” “I knew lots of people in the areas of Bosnia that were excited to send me materials so that I could understand their clothes better,” says Binder.

“We had an idea about what we liked with color. We tried to stay with blues and browns—something very Eastern European. It’s not necessarily immediately beautiful, but as you look at it, you are drawn to it.” “Hopefully, they will feel like real people’s clothes, matched to real personalities,” says Jolie.

To do that, Binder spent a great deal of time with each individual actor in order to create unique costumes for their characters. “Gabriele talked to each actor in such detail that every single one of them, no matter how small their part, had a real say in who they were, and why they were dressed the way they were.

That’s very, very hard. In military uniforms, for example, everyone is wearing the same clothes, and sometimes they can look like they don’t suit the person wearing them – they can be too shiny, too new. . Gabriele managed to get past all of those hurdles. I think she’s extraordinary.”

Semler, Hutman, and Binder have all marveled at Jolie’s collaborative nature. But for her, that instinct seems perfectly natural. “I walked on that set every day so grateful and amazed that I was surrounded by so many talented, extraordinary people. It would’ve been foolish to not let them help guide the process,” she relates.

“I think that’s the most wonderful thing about filmmaking: the team. I never felt that as much as an actor because we’re separated from the crew. Emotionally, we’re in a place that we have to stay in. We live in that second world, the world inside the production. The crew works as a team, as a collaborative unit.

You inspire each other; you get excited by each other’s ideas. It’s the most fun part of the creative process. It’s wonderful to be a creative person, but to play, experiment and learn with others is really what we all want. I couldn’t imagine it any other way. Every single person who worked on that film taught me so much.”

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Between 1992 and 1995, the Bosnian war claimed the lives of approximately 100,000 people and drove more than 2 million people from their homes, as refugees or internally displaced persons. In a pattern of “ethnic cleansing,” militias attacked and expelled civilians in areas under their control to create ethnically pure enclaves.

It is against this backdrop that Angelina Jolie is making her directional debut this year with In the Land of Blood and Honey. After securing her script and the financing, Jolie set about assembling the right actors for the jobs. It had always been paramount to approach the casting process with sensitivity and care.

“When the roles were being cast, we had the casting director ask the actors what they’d gone through, what their backgrounds were,” she says. “I wanted to cast a Bosnian Serb as the lead actor, and a Bosnian Muslim or someone from a mixed family as the lead actress. I also wanted men from Serbia willing to work on the project, not just Bosnian Serbs.

That country’s involvement artistically was very important to me.” People from all backgrounds and creeds were asked to come together to tell this story. The first actor to come on board was Rade Šerbedžija. Šerbedžija plays Nebojsa, the Serb general whose invocations of tradition and nationalism have a strong sway over his conflicted son, Danijel.

Croatian Serb by birth and raised in Zagreb, Šerbedžija was known in Hollywood in the 1990s for playing foreign villains. While the character of Nebojsa certainly fell along the villainous spectrum, Šerbedžija sensed something richer and more resonant about him than most depictions of Serb soldiers during the war.

“I had been offered a number of roles in films about the war in Yugoslavia, and had refused quite a few,” he says. But Jolie’s script offered a different take on the war. “Angelina called me and we talked,” says Šerbedžija. “I liked her approach to the subject, and how she talked about it, her motives and her passion.”

For Šerbedžija, the scope was what set the film apart. “I think that the script Angelina wrote has the depth of a Greek tragedy, which is really hard to find in today’s movie making,” he elaborates. “That’s why I hope that by approaching the tragedy from an intimate angle, maybe it will help people understand the war as not one happening to some ‘strange people in a far country,’ but to people like them, complex people that get dragged in. It can also happen to them.”

For the rest of the cast, Jolie kept herself anonymous in order to avoid any coloring of the project for the auditioning actors. “The cast didn’t know who was behind the film, or the size of it; I kept my name off the scripts. I just wanted to know if they were responding to the material.” Zana Marjanović, a Bosnian Muslim who plays Ajla, the film’s protagonist, was convinced that the script was a local creation.

“Those scenes were so authentic. I was almost sure they had to have been written by a Bosnian writer! It seemed so familiar to me.” Such a response to the film’s story was crucial for Jolie. “I had already decided that we wouldn’t make the film unless the actors responded positively.”

Actor Nikola Djurićko, a Serbian who plays Serb soldier Darko, remembers when he discovered that Jolie had written the script and was to direct it. “The casting director said to me, ‘She liked you a lot,’” Djurićko says. “I asked, ‘Who liked me a lot?’ She said, ‘Angelina Jolie.’ I said, ‘Don’t you lie to me!’ It was like winning the lottery, because as an actor in Belgrade, you don’t expect to get an offer like that very often.”

Goran Kostić, a Bosnian Serb who plays Danijel, the tortured soldier who’s caught between his love for Ajla and his loyalty to his father, thought that it made perfect sense for the project to have come from Jolie. “When I first found out that it was Angelina who wrote the script, I was of course surprised. I thought, ‘why does she want to do this?’

Then when I thought about the subject matter and her humanitarian work, I realized that she wants to help the world, so of course, this film fits. It’s a natural progression, the next big step in her work.”

The character of Ajla is a Bosnian Muslim artist, a woman whose expressiveness and lust for life attracts Danijel. Those qualities also leave her confused about her feelings for him once the war starts. Such a complex individual required a performance from someone with a star-like presence. For Jolie, Marjanović has the transfixing qualities of a movie star.

“When Zana’s audition tape came on, I physically leaned forward,” Jolie says. “She’s someone who draws you in. She has something about her that very few people possess on screen. She has a mystery and a strength that I find captivating and powerful. She’s very much a woman to me. She represents what a woman is.

She holds the screen without having to do or say anything. That was so important for the character of Ajla, because she lives so much in silence. The actress had to be so complex and interesting that you could be fascinated by her just standing in a room. Zana has that, I was so lucky to work with such an extraordinarily gifted actress who had such a depth of emotion that she brings to the screen.”

Moviegoers can experience the full story in cinemas around the US on December 23, 2011.

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Every cast member of In the Land of Blood and Honey, which will hit American cinemas on December 23, was in some way directly affected by the events of the war. Each brought their own stories and experiences to the project and enriched their characters and the film with their own histories.

Zana Marjanović was fortunate enough to be able to escape to Slovenia during the war. “I was born in Sarajevo and was only eight years old during the war. My father chose to stay in Sarajevo. The war came as a huge surprise, and no one thought the war would last as long as it did. It’s one of the reasons why my mom took us to Slovenia.

Many Bosnian Muslims emigrated, but my mother believed the war would end the next day, every day. So we waited in the closest country for the war to end, so we could go back home.”

In 2001, Marjanović moved back to Sarajevo where she currently lives. The notion of Ajla being an artist was what Marjanović most personally connected with. Being an artist allows Ajla to be expressive, to share the way that she sees the world, to create. It allows her to be open to new experiences and new ideas.

“An artist feels and perceives things in very specific ways,” says Marjanović, “and leaves his or her expression for others to see.” I like this sense of character for Ajla. Artists are also often very strong yet delicate persons. And the same could be said of Ajla.”

Goran Kostić suggests that it is Ajla who symbolizes the future, whereas Danijel is trapped in the past. “She is everything he is not,” Kostić says. “Ajla is the creative one; she is the one who sees the world. Danijel is always holding back, and she’s always pushing forward. She has a courage and an energy he is attracted to.”

Angelina Jolie sees Ajla in a precarious and almost impossible situation. “There’s a point where Danijel is safety and security. And there’s a point where she has to decide if he’s redeemable, or simply her enemy. She is put in a very different situation, and how she tries to gain the upper hand becomes the chess game of the film.”

Kostić, a Bosnian Serb, had a direct connection to the war, and to the character of Danijel. “Every single Kostić back to the beginning of time was a military person. I’m the first to break this tradition. If you weren’t a general by the age of 45 in my family, you were nothing. I had this really strong feeling growing up about who I was supposed to be. I was even accepted to the military academy, but I turned it down.”

“I was born and raised in Sarajevo. I left for London when I was 20, a year before the war started. At the time, communism was falling, and economically, Yugoslavia was quite strong.

There was a healthy middle class there. So after communism, there was an exciting liberal sense of freedom in the air. While I was in London, the war began. That entire feeling vanished overnight. My girlfriend at the time—she’s my wife now—was with me. We both realized we couldn’t go home because there was no home to go to.”

Being separated from his family made his situation all the more conflicting as the war dragged on. “It was awful. For the first two years, I felt this strange void in myself. I was working as a waiter at the time, but it was always very mechanical. My mind was somewhere else. There was a point where I knew exactly when each British station would hold their news broadcasts.

I had to check the news 24 hours a day. I would jump into empty hotel rooms and watch the news to hear what was happening in Bosnia. Thankfully, my family made it out without anyone being killed or any of our possessions destroyed. I remember talking to my mother on the phone. I can hear the bombs in the distance. All I can say is, ‘Mom, take care of yourself.’

This was the same weekend as a London bombing. And my mom actually tells me, ‘Son, take care of yourself.’ I didn’t know whether to cry or smile! It was the first time where I had to ask, ‘What should I do? Who am I as a man, as the son of a Serbian officer? Should I fight? Who should I fight for?’

I could never come up with an answer I truly believed in. Eventually, I realized that the best thing was to stay away. There was no good fight.” He may not have fought, but Kostić strongly relates his own conflicts with Danijel’s. “I never participated in the war, but Danijel is also not a happy participant,” he says.

“He’s isn’t strong enough to not fight. He’s not in charge of his fate. He’s a prisoner to himself and his circumstances.” Jolie notes how much Danijel is controlled by the forces around him. “By nature of his family and the war, he was put in a position that he isn’t strong enough to refuse or escape, and he doesn’t quite know how to handle it.

He knows there’s something wrong. As he says, he recognizes people. He has trouble seeing an enemy in somebody he went to school with. He questions the war, but is never able to follow through with the questioning.”

“Danijel never became a true man, a free man,” Kostić says. “If we all had the strength to not participate, maybe the war would never have occurred. He allows himself to be pushed and shoved by history, by tradition, by his father. He doesn’t bother to protect himself from these bad dark forces coming over him. He may not pull the trigger initially, but he is just as guilty as those who do.”

Danijel’s inability to behave with any kind of will leaks into his own wishful thinking about his relationship with Ajla. “Danijel is pretending that they have some kind of normal life together,” Kostić says, “but it’s crumbling as time passes. It follows the way humanity deteriorates in Bosnia at that time.

It begins pure and about love, and then starts twisting and turning and getting darker. Danijel starts out feeling protected with Ajla from the world outside. She is like a mother to him, but eventually it’s not about love anymore.”

Marjanović recognizes the conflict and strain that the relationship has on Ajla’s choices. “She’s constantly in conflict. She’s not in love with the enemy; she’s in love, and later, that person becomes her enemy. There’s never a single moment when she ‘turns,’ but it slowly evolves throughout the film.

Ajla always has a sense of justice throughout, even if her decisions are very emotionally difficult. There’s never any hate or vengeful feelings, but she knows that her actions are right. It’s about sacrificing something you love for the greater good.”

Image Courtesy of   http://www.inthelandofbloodandhoney.com

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