The Guardian
April 13, 2001
By Fiachra Gibbons

When Milcho Manchevski persuaded Joseph Fiennes to star in his movie in the Balkans, nobody mentioned forest fires, dysentery, mad sheep, plagues of wasps - or the nearby war. Fiachra Gibbons reports from the set of the 'eastern western' Dust

Joe Fiennes is having another bad day. While Naomi Campbell grows impatient for his company in London - and the lady is not one for waiting - he is stuck on a scorching hot Balkan mountain top, the air thick with every sort of biting and stinging insect. The brain begins to boil at about 42 degrees celsius (108 fahrenheit) - and, this morning, with forest fires raging on the horizon, the temperature is touching a barely believable 50. Joe won't be getting to London any time soon.

Today, though, he gets to give his Australian co-star David Wenham a good kicking. You can hear the dull thud of boot on rib as soon as you leave the shade of the ancient Orthodox monastery of Treskovec in southern Macedonia and snake your way up through the tinder-dry alpine meadow strewn with Byzantine rubble to the baking rock of the summit.

Wenham is writhing in the dust, coughing and spluttering, surrounded by a halo of wasps. Fiennes, unshaven, irritable and obviously relishing the prospect of another day stewing in his own sweat, kicks him in the stomach, grinds the heel of his cowboy boot down on Wenham's hand and drawls: "You never were no good, Luke."

This goes on, with a short break for lunch and an adjustment of Wenham's bandages, from 9am until after 8pm. By then, even Milcho Manchevski (the man who persuaded them to "come to Macedonia and be in my 'eastern' - it'll be fun") has had enough. And this was one of the good days on the set of Dust, the first "baklava western". Even by the tortuous standards of movie-making, this was a bizarre and horrendous shoot - Apocalypse Now without the luxury of a studio budget.

The omens were not good. From day one, the crew began dropping like flies from dysentery and a medical dictionary of equally nasty complaints - even the unit doctor invalided himself out. Then it got weirder. A week before I arrived, as the worst heatwave to hit the Balkans in 30 years added sunstroke to the sick list, a flock of marauding sheep, half-demented with thirst, overran the set. These being Balkan sheep, there were casualties. A few days later, several people were badly stung by thousands of wasps drawn to the watermelons bought to keep the surviving crew from expiring. The swarm was followed by plagues of mosquitoes and horse flies.

Then came dark mutterings from the Macedonians on the crew of a government plot. Wasn't it strange how, as the thermometers on set screeched towards 50 degrees celsius, each night on the state TV news the temperature never topped 42 - the level above which a national emergency would have to be declared and all work stop?

It was as if the film - a Cain and Abel, id versus ego, parable of two cowboy brothers from the old American west who bring their deadly filial feud to Macedonia when they enlist as mercenaries on opposing sides during the first Balkan war of 1912 - had incurred the wrath of the Almighty. If it sounds like something only Sam Peckinpah might have attempted, you'd be right. But then old Sam always claimed to have the devil on his side.

Everything, including Nato, seems to have conspired against Dust and its dramatic historical sweep from the badlands of Arizona to bandit-ravaged turn-of-the-century Bitola, where the young Ataturk fought in vain to keep the Macedonia of his birth under Ottoman control. As final preparations for filming began in the spring of 1999, war broke out in neighbouring Kosovo and frightened the money away. Manchevski's pleas to be allowed to go ahead were drowned out by the roar of American B52s passing overhead on their way to pulverise Pristina.

There was one other unquantifiable factor at work here almost as fiery as the weather. For, presiding over this surreal Fitzcarraldo in a huge cartoon stetson hat was the enigmatic figure of Manchevski himself, a former punk from the Macedonian capital of Skopje, who walked off the set of his last film after only a fortnight because he claimed its Hollywood producer thought "she had a bigger dick than me". And yes, those immortal words "He'll never work in this town again" - or ones very like them - were indeed uttered by Laura "Pretty Woman" Ziskin after that spectacular falling out on the cannibal flick Ravenous. (Tellingly, the crew rebelled against Manchevski's replacement and Ravenous was eventually finished by the British director Antonia Bird, who maintains that its problems were not of Manchevski's making. "He'd been stitched up big time, in my opinion.")

Even shorn of his green mohican, Manchevski cuts quite a figure. Only someone with a highly developed sense of the ridiculous could stride on to a set in a joke cowboy hat and badass shades, with a vast pashmina shawl draped around his narrow shoulders, and expect to take charge. First impressions, of course, can be very deceptive. Manchevski may have picked up the swagger, and that eccentric dress sense, directing pop videos in America for the likes of Arrested Development, but he is no cocky fool. For he knew there was a lot more than money, or even whether he would be allowed behind a camera again, riding on Dust.

"I spent five and half years sweating blood to make this film," he says. "I was making a shit-load of money trying to make studio films, but I just couldn't do it. You can't make good films that mean something by remote control. You couldn't make up what happens in LA, it's beyond satire. Hollywood is full of the most miserable, unhappy people I have ever met - and I'm from the Balkans."

That little contretemps with Ziskin, arguably the most powerful woman in Hollywood, would have probably finished his career had Manchevski not had an Oscar nomination and won the Golden Lion at Venice for Before the Rain, his lyrical debut warning of what might happen if Macedonia followed the rest of the former Yugoslavia over the abyss into war.

It is hard to underestimate the effect Before the Rain had on this tiny, fragile and fragmented country of 3m, with no obvious historical or ethnic precedents other than a shared reluctance from its either Slav or Albanian-speaking peoples to throw their lot in with the madhouses of Belgrade or Tirana. Macedonia - the word means "mixed" - also has Serb, Vlach, Roma and Bulgar minorities, making it in present Balkan terms more a conundrum than a country. In such disputed circumstances, Manchevski has become, unwittingly and unwillingly, more national talisman than mere film-maker. His perfectionism may make him a nightmare to work with at times, but in a country where cliques and political cabals hold sway, his unimpeachable punk contrariness has won him the trust of ordinary Macedonians.

Until the skirmishes on the Kosovan border near Tetovo last month, both main Macedonian communities shared a fierce common pride in being the only former Yugoslav republic in which not a single shot had been fired in anger. The dreamlike Before the Rain, and its powerful appeal for tolerance, was the fairytale all ethnic groups seemed to have taken to heart. New countries need heroes, and Manchevski, the punk who ran away to the US "as soon as I could", and who cites the Sex Pistols as his greatest formative influence, was accidentally cast in the role of its chief iconographer. The prodigal son was being handed the mythic glue to hold the nation together - it was as if Malcolm McLaren was being asked to reinvent the monarchy.

Dust - in which shifting alliances of Albanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Turks, Greeks and various brigand bands battle for dominance as Macedonia emerges from five centuries of Ottoman rule - will be watched through that very delicate prism when it first sees the light of day at either the Cannes or the Venice film festivals; both are currently battling for the right to show it first. It is a fair bet that a few shadowy men from the Pentagon and the UN will want an early look, too.

If that responsibility weighs heavily on Manchevski, he doesn't show it. Wiry, boyish and as charming as he is intense, even among his own he's a person apart, an effect intensified by a slightly off-centre pupil in one eye. No one knows much about his childhood in Skopje and he likes to keep it that way.

His mischievous bluster, though, betrays a certain nervousness. "I am an outsider. I was never part of any political or cultural establishment, even though in these parts you have to be because social life is so tribal. It's very like Hollywood, I guess. So I haven't had to sell my ass, which makes the government here suspicious of me. All this talk of civil war is crazy and dangerous. I really don't think it can happen. Then again, I said that about Bosnia. Macedonia is not Kosovo, you just can't compare how the Albanians have been treated in both places. I'll let you into a secret. That fighting in Tetovo is all my fault. I bribed them [the Albanian guerrillas] for publicity for the film and they just got a little carried away."

Skopje airport has that uneasy feel of a place just out of earshot of something nasty. The flight from London was full of wary Americans and country casual Brits with Sandhurst accents pretending to be something in the City. A US Chinook helicopter thundered by as soon as we landed, lugging itself over the ammunition and fuel dumps that line the runway and out across the bristling weaponry dug into the fields beyond. It was bound for Kosovo, just beyond the ridge of mountains on the horizon where a low-level war is still raging. Systematic Serb ethnic cleansing of the long-suffering majority Albanian community has given way to slow and but equally cynical creation of an ethnically pure Albanian state. Nato keeps score with impeccable fairness.

You can tell how close a country is to going belly-up when everyone with a car becomes a taxi driver - and everyone in the surging throng outside the doors of Skopje airport, except the Albanian women in scarves and ankle-length coats wrestling returning sons to their chests, was a taxi driver. Before the Balkan wars of the 1990s, it was the second poorest Yugoslav republic after Kosovo, now its unemployment rate is more than 50%. The average weekly wage for those lucky enough to still be in work is £25. You can't eat spectacular scenery.

With the roads thick with US military convoys and Humvees full of GIs using their R&R to chase out-of-work Skopje factory girls, it is not hard to see where Manchevski drew the inspiration for Dust, where Fiennes's fire-and-brimstone Arizona preacher hunts down and does battle with his amoral beast of a brother in the middle of someone else's war.

Setting the story just as the Ottoman empire collapsed, almost overnight, and took the most stable, multi-ethnic society in Europe with it, was no accident either. It is from the two, short, messy wars in 1912 and 1913 that the myth of the unruly, ungovernable Balkans largely stems. Manchevski drew on the detailed reports of the Carnegie commission into the first and second Balkan wars for much of his material, but it was the far more colourful Confessions of a Macedonian Bandit written by the San Franciscan adventurer Albert Sonnichsen a few years earlier that really fascinated him. "I became very conscious of the parallels of westerners, particularly Americans, getting sucked into local quarrels and wars, almost always without fully understanding what is going on. It was as if they were trying to work out something in themselves. It is like with some charity workers now; it's all a glorified way of going to the shrink." Just to reinforce the point, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, has a memorable cameo in the movie - being sick over the side of a transatlantic liner.

Sonnichsen's photographs of these outlandishly dressed bands of brigands convinced Manchevski he had to shoot the film in "baklava" mode. "We couldn't use some of the things Sonnichsen described because they were just too fantastic. People would not believe it. The more I saw and read, the more I was reminded of the most way-out Mexican Zapatista revolutionaries and bandilleros - it was like they had been shopping in the same boutique."

The violence was another common thread. For, when it came to cold calculated cruelty, the sullen cowpokes who populate the novels of Cormac McCarthy and the films of Sam Peckinpah scraped the same barrel as the Balkan brigands. "It is very hard reading the Carnegie commission reports," says Manchevski, "because you realise the violence that went on then is still happening in the Balkans. People were sliced open and their guts used to strangle them. Arms were cut off and then used to beat that person to death, people buried up to their necks and set alight with gasoline. This became the general western perception of Balkan behaviour that was reinforced by the misconceptions created by writers such as Rebecca West [author of the "definitive" Yugoslav travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon]. When you need to exorcise your own demons, you assign them to someone else. This was not violence unknown to the west, or indeed in the old American west. On the contrary the violence in the Balkans was always and still is less efficient."

Manchevski, it has to be said, is a Slav, but even the Albanians in Tetovo I spoke to this week, whose attitude to those gunmen in the hills is ambivalent to say the least, agree the time has now come to put away the guns and talk.

"I won't lie to you. It's been hell, but things are at last looking up," Chris Auty, the film's English co-producer assured me the night I arrived at their base in the dusty provincial town of Prilep. A few hours later Auty, a man of limitless optimism and good grace, was savaged by a mastiff on the doorstep of his hotel. He even managed a toothy smile as he limped, nauseous, back on to the set the next day at Treskovac after a double tetanus jab. I hadn't the heart to mention rabies. "Could have been worse," he sighed. Manchevski could have bitten him.

Film-making, particularly in 50 degree heat in awkward, inaccessible locations can be a testy business at the best of times. But Auty, an old Bertolucci hand, and no stranger to controversy having produced David Cronenberg's Crash, does not try to conceal that working with Manchevski, who admits a fondness for lobbing the occasional grenade to liven things up, has made the shoot "one of life's more interesting experiences".

"Milcho is Milcho, he's a one-off. I know it all going to be worth it because the guy is a genius, but it's been tough. We have all suffered, but I think he has suffered most, because it means so much to him, and you have to respect that. It's been the most gruelling shoot I've ever been on. In fairness, nature could not have been more cruel; as well as the heat we have had every kind of plague she could have thrown at us."

In another one of those little absurdities that surrounded Dust and its grim merry-go-round of racial conflict, there was more than the odd crackle of ethnic tension on set too.

Playing frisbee during a break in the filming at the monastery with a medieval copper plate that a couple of the Macedonian crew members had found among the ancient ruins of the summit, I got a whiff of simmering discontent among the natives. It was clear the "imperious" attitude of a few of the British crew called in to straighten things out had not gone down terribly well. Nor were they happy that technicians they felt could have been recruited locally were being flown in from London.

Manchevski warns about not seeing the sties in your own eye, but even he is highly critical of what he calls the "anachronistic structures" of Albanian life which he blames for allowing "those men with machine guns in the hills above Tetovo to hijack the whole concept of human rights. When the world feels sorry for the Albanians, I think they should remember their grievances are not so great that they justify going to war. Macedonia is a state based on a proper cohabitation and toleration."

And Manchevski is a Macedonian liberal. His views on the gangsterism he sees spreading among rural Albanians are equally forthright. "Too much has been made of this stuff about centuries' old hatreds. At least a part of the shooting is about local strongmen being able to keep their fiefdoms so there are open roads for smuggling, the drug trade and who runs the brothels and gets first go. It is that basic for a lot of these guys with the guns. There is a big problem with crime, drug- running and prostitution among the Albanian community and it has got to be faced up to."

Back in Tetovo, Artan Skendera is getting his breath back after the busiest month of his life. He runs the local Albanian TV station, Art TV, from which most of the pictures of the fighting have been sent. It's been good for business, but it's business he'd rather do without.

Artan, as the name of his station suggests, is an idealist, a believer in the power of art to overcome all enmities. He is also a big fan of Manchevski - the film-maker if not the proto-politician. "If everyone in Macedonia was like Manchevski, we would have less problems. Before the Rain told the truth about all the peoples of Macedonia. It was very important for all of us, it showed our lives to the world."

Dust too, he hopes, might bring Slavs and Albanians closer again. "Some things like beauty and art are above nationalism," he says. It is asking a lot from a piece of entertainment.

Dust will be released later this year.