interview by Kim CUCULIC
NOVI LIST: You were supposed to appear in "King Lear" last year, also directed by Lenka Udovicki and staged on the island of Mali Brijun. Rade Serbedzija played King Lear in that production. Did you change your mind because of your apartment in Zagreb (it was confiscated by the authorities) or simply because you were still not ready for such a step?
MIRA FURLAN: Let's say I was not ready to face my former life. I think that the verdict regarding my apartment, after a trial that took almost ten years, was so absurd that at that moment everything seemed senseless. I simply did not feel welcome in this country, and I still feel that way.
That is why I am glad that we are sort of isolated here in the Brijuni islands, which allows us to work undisturbed. Then, a person does not think about certain things that would be unavoidable under different circumstances. In that sense Rade's and Lenka's idea is perfect, because here we are, in a way, totally out of reach of time and space, dedicated to our work and surrounded by beautiful nature.
I must admit that I am really enjoying myself and that the whole experience has surpassed my expectations. The whole experience is very unusual. Suddenly I am surrounded by people I haven't seen for eleven years, and now I hang out with them, drink coffee and we work on a play. On the other hand, all of that is so normal, because we had spent so many years together. Although I left, I know them better than people I've met in the meantime. That is the horror of emigration of the middle-aged. When your life falls apart at the age of 35, it is extremely difficult to put it back together.
Thinking about which classical plays are suitable for staging in the open, I drifted to the ancient Greece by default. We also talked about Chekhov, my favorite writer. Sometimes, it seems to me that we should have staged a lighter piece, because "Medea" is a bloody and cruel tragedy. However, the moment we started with rehearsing that amazing and very modern play, I realized that we've done the right thing by tackling the most difficult play we could.
As a mother and woman, do you find it hard to identify yourself with such a complex character, a woman who kills her own children?
In "Medea", Euripides in a very modern manner develops a face off of two opposing life principles. The first one is embodied by Medea - total faith in love to the end, and readiness to remain faithful to oneself regardless of the consequences. Contrary to that, Jason is an opportunist, pragmatist, careerist, a rational and practical person, in a way an embodiment of capitalist and "American" ideals. The fact that in the end Medea commits a crime, only makes this tragedy that much more humane.
We cannot support Medea, because her crime is so horrendous and unimaginable, but madness is also a part of human nature. The shift in her mind happens because of her desperation, pain and feeling of betrayal.
In a way, that is a metaphor for a war, and staging of "Medea" in this region gives it special significance. In that sense "Medea" is not only a play about marital conflict, with which Euripides preceded both Ibsen and Strindberg. "Medea" is much more. In the last scene Jason and Medea are still fighting their private war above the bodies of their slain children, just like in a real war. That means that suffering and casualties cannot teach people to transcend hatred. That makes "Medea" incredibly pertinent for this region.
This production of "Medea" will specifically touch upon the problem of exile, which you personally faced. Did you recognize your own fate in Medea, in that sense?
I find that aspect of Euripides' tragedy very familiar. Jason says to Medea, I paraphrase: "Don't you understand? You can thank us for teaching you how to behave like a civilized woman, instead of a savage from the wastelands. Now, you're in democratic Greece, which taught you everything you know". In a way it deals with globalization and modern world, when America teaches all of us how to live and we are supposed to be infinitely grateful. In the process, the Americans throw a few bombs here and there, install a few fascist regimes, but we still have to be grateful because they are "great" and "civilized". They don't want to know that here we had theater while their country was still nothing but a prairie roamed by bison. All those aspects are present in "Medea".
How are the rehearsals going? Are you satisfied with Lenka Udovicki's direction?
I am awed by Lenka's passion, dedication and attention for detail. I must admit that I have grown unaccustomed to that type of work, because in America stage productions are typically finished in three weeks. The American theater is happy with the "first reaction" acting, which means that whatever first comes to their minds goes. They work very fast because there is simply no time. TV work is the same. That is why at times I feel nervous during rehearsals, because it seems to me that we've taken care of a scene and it's time to move on. However, the beauty of rehearsing is precisely that one is allowed to make mistakes, and see first hand that something is not good, go back and try something else. I am interested in that research process.
After eleven years, you again act in Croatian language. Did you have any difficulty in connection with that?
The knowledge of one's mother language is like riding a bicycle or swimming. After all, I did live here for a long time and learned how to act. Besides, I talk in Croatian with my husband at home. Aleksandar Cvjetkovic, who plays Jason, has a much harder time. He lives in Italy and his wife is Italian. As far as I am concerned, my Croatian "came back" momentarily and I am enjoying the ease of acting in my native language.
I'd rather not talk about details on this occasion. I'm getting tired of retelling one and the same story over and over. Since I was brought up on rock and roll and Beatnik literature, I was surprised when I realized that everything I love in America is actually on the margins of the society. America is a very materialistic and puritanical society, and of course, also extremely hypocritical. Everything boils down to whether you're "successful" or "unsuccessful", and I am getting tired of that. It is hard to discard things that our parents thought us and things we believed in and strove for while we were young. Based on music and film, I had created a totally different picture of America. In that sense, we were much more educated and knowledgeable.
In one conversation with some acquaintances from the US, I mentioned a song by Frank Zappa, and they responded that they have heard of him, but that they had never listened to his music. America is today totally isolated. They do not care about anything outside their borders. That is where we again return to "Medea". They are afraid of everything that is even remotely subversive, or even only a bit different. The whole "alternative" has been sucked into the mainstream culture and the so-called establishment. In America, there is actually no alternative. Everything has been "eaten up" by money. In that sense the process of globalization has been completed. Globalization was created as an American propaganda term, because it would not be appropriate to say that they want to "swallow" the whole world. Whether they will succeed in that ambition, or whether they will be destroyed as every great civilization so far, remains to be seen.
At first you lived in New York, and today in Los Angeles. Which one of those two cities do you prefer?
These two cities are like two different planets. Unlike New York, which is actually a true European city, Los Angeles was an enormous cultural shock for me. I think that it is a bigger cultural shock to move from New York to Los Angeles, than from Europe to New York. However, Los Angeles also has its advantages. Above all wonderful climate and beautiful nature. It is not surprising that European immigrants, moving from the east to the west of the continent were convinced that they had found El dorado, "a promised land". In many ways, California is paradise on earth.
However, interpersonal relations present a problem. In that sense Los Angeles is really "wild west". The only difference is that today they have cars instead of horses. Their culture is appropriately, cruel and harsh, based on "winner takes all". That self-drive and individualism are in a way impressive, but they have a dark side as well, which is terrifying. Here the true victors are boundless greed, arrogance, vulgarity, and unscrupulousness. That is actually the irony of my move to the US. I left because I felt a need to preserve my moral integrity, and then I arrived in Hollywood, which does not even know what morality is. There people are prepared to do anything in order to get a role, money, or anything else. The packaging is not political, but in the end it boils down to the same thing.
"Actors' Studio" is actually an acting workshop. It is not unusual for Al Pacino or Paul Newman to drop by from time to time, in order to rehearse a scene they like. All of that sounds much better than it is in reality. There is a lot of coasting, and people spend way too much time on a bench in front of the studio, drinking coffee and whining about lack of work.
Despite many serious roles in theater and on film, you've become popular in the US after your role in the TV series "Babylon 5". Did that make you aware of the power of television? How important was that experience for you?
I became aware of that early, in the former Yugoslavia, when the TV serial "Velo Misto" was being broadcast. I hated it when kids and people in the street would shout after me "Kate, Kate". I found that a bit offensive because at the time I acted in many important plays in the theater. I know that I should have made peace with that, but I never actually could. There is always certain dissatisfaction with the way you're seen, accepted, treated, understood by others.
Regarding "Babylon 5", that TV serial gave me financial security. It was also very well written, unlike most American TV programs. I found the relentless speed of taping of the episodes exhausting. It is a specific type of training, and I'm not sure it's actually useful for actors. An actor is trained to react to the role quickly and to be somewhat superficial. We would often receive the script hours before the taping was supposed to start, or changes in the script would be made only thirty minutes before we were supposed to start. I had the most trouble with make-up. I had to get up at 3am, appear on the set at 4, and by 7 everything had to be ready for the shoot.
The serial is still very popular and I still receive piles of letters daily. That was a good and useful experience, because I learned to function quickly and without mistakes. Another irony of fate is that SF is definitely not among my favorite genres. Nonetheless, the serial had serious dramatic elements, and here and there we had a few "Shakespearean" dialogues. The serial had the ambition to speak through SF genre about political and social reality of our world, so that, as far as my character is concerned, there were many parallels with "our" war, the issue of Western intervention in Bosnia and so on.
Who did not get such roles? We should ask men why that is the case. I always found that very frustrating. However, as an actress and a professional, I always tried to do each one of my roles as well as possible. In life we also don't have as much choice as we would like. Now, after gaining some experience, I don't think I would waste my time on such insulting roles.
In my career, I also had some interesting female roles, as for example in the movies "Three are needed for happiness", and "In the Jaws of Life" by Rajko Grlic. True, in "In the Jaws of Life" I ended up with a total cliché and I recall that I was very unhappy when they died my hair blonde. But, nonetheless, that was one of very few ex-Yu movies, which looked at life from a female point of view, thanks to Rajko Grlic, its director, and Dubravka Ugresic, who wrote the script. Srdjan Karanovic created a beautiful "chick flick", "Petrija's Wreath". In Slovenia, I acted in "Loves of Blanka Kolak" with Boris Jurjasevic. Therefore, here and there, there were "female" topics and "female" movies. I also fondly remember my role in the movie "Beauty of Vice" by Zivko Nikolic. He was a truly wonderful man and I was saddened to hear about his death.
I once talked with Rade Serbedzija about this topic, treatment of female characters in the film, and I recalled the movie by Zivojin Pavlovic, a genius, "See You in the Next War" in which I could not recognize any of the actresses. Namely, in that film there is no single close up of a female face. Only sex matters, there are no faces, they are unimportant. Rade then told me that the best ex-Yu movies were actually manly, rough, macho movies, which is true. I guess that is the matter of mentality or, simply the way world is. It isn't any better in the US, except that methods for producing stereotypical female roles are more sophisticated.
Yes, there is something... I'm not sure how to explain. Perhaps that's my inclination to strong emotion, which is, it seems to me, apparently old fashioned these days. Sometimes it occurs to me that I live at a wrong time. Even while working on theatrical productions people try to "cool" things down, everyone is concerned that there would be too much emotion, and I am always afraid that there would be too little emotion. It seems that our society is afraid of emotion. Emotion is dangerous, while distance keeps you away from the world and protects from injury.
Perhaps by taking on tragic roles I sort of engage in psychotherapy, a desire to live through intense emotions, while at the same time protecting oneself from heartbreak. I read somewhere that someone has calculated that frequent portrayal of king Edipus can extend life expectancy of an actor by several years. I guess it is a sort of a cathartic experience, which cleanses us from everything that pollutes and poisons us. That is why theater and acting is beautiful. At the same time that is a difficult profession, because it cleanses a person and forces us to deal with our inner demons, but we don't have to pay the ultimate price.
Your work on Medea has already provoked negative reactions by some of your "colleagues" in the media. Does that mean that nothing significant has changed since your departure from Croatia?
I don't know. I cannot judge from here. Feral Tribune is my only link with Croatia. I regularly read it in the US. Every time I read an issue of Feral, it makes me very sad. Obviously, things are not changing very fast. However, the very fact that Rade and I are here, that this troop exists, indicates that the overall atmosphere has somewhat improved, or deteriorated, depending on your political views.
At far as statements of my colleagues, actors, are concerned, I wonder whether they reflect their true political views or some sort of inner need for destruction of a person. It is interesting that all of them are absolutely confident in their knowledge of me, of my motives, actions, and views. All of that knowledge is based on the portrayal created by the media. Thereby, they criticize something they know nothing about. Of course, all of that makes me very sad, but obviously there is nothing I can do about it.
Nothing is definite. I now live in the US, but I cannot predict what will happen in the future. For now I am not considering the return. The return would be as difficult as the departure. I wonder whether a man can summon enough strength to keep repeating beginnings and ends in his life. Let me again return to my fascination with America and the so-called "perpetual reinvention of oneself". I like that as the idea, but it remains to be seen how many times a person can go through such an experiment, or "crime" against oneself. What we are doing here in Brijuni, is wonderful, and I shall always gladly work with Lenka and Rade.
Let me also mention that I admire Novi List, especially because Slobodan Snajder [dissident Croat playwright] is one of your columnists. I am constantly in touch with him and hope to collaborate at some point with his theater, ZKM. I don't know whether that will actually happen, because such collaboration would require that I move to Croatia for a while. As far as Croat films are concerned, no one has offered me anything so far.
Does that mean that apart from Feral you've lost touch with all of your colleagues and friends?
I don't have many colleagues or friends left. That is the worst part of my and Rade Serbedzija's, Dubravka Ugresic's and other stories. The so-called media created symbols and ideas out of us and we thereby stopped being persons. Our selves were eliminated, and ideas and symbols remained. I can sort of understand that someone who does not know me can believe something they read about me in the newspapers, but I find it totally incomprehensible when an old friend who was at my home a day before and shared a meal reacts that way. And precisely that happened.
The propaganda was so strong that that whole process was remarkably successful. Everything the former authorities did was very effective. In a way, you must "admire" them, because they really did a good job. How can then a friend send me a letter, if I don't exist as a person? Instead, there's only an idea. Whether I have anything to do with the labels that were stuck to me because of someone's political interests is a totally different topic.
There are about three-four people who have remained in my heart despite everything and are important to me. As far as friendship is concerned nothing will ever be the same. There will always be a distance and so many unspoken things. A friend of mine says that it is enough to say: "Forgive me if I've hurt you and I forgive you if you've hurt me". Perhaps that is enough. I mean, it is enough in some cases, with some special and very dear people. In general I do not believe in general forgiveness and forgetting. I can forgive, but never forget.
It is horrible to lose old friends, because they are irreplaceable. A person cannot make new old friends. These are people who know me, who went to school with me and shared experiences you cannot share with anyone else, and no one else can understand. In itself that is an irreplaceable value. That is why we should forgive. But, not to everyone.