Gusinje i Plav

Joe, I confess that for the last couple of weeks, this project to create a film treatment for “Blood Of Montenegro” has had me pretty much intimidated. I have only very sketchy understanding of the process of creating a professional treatment, though I do know how to format and structure a screenplay. (I have a dozen of them completed, out shopping.) Even so, I have very little knowledge about such matters as production, finance, and marketing constraints, and how those might influence the decisions about which parts of the book to bring to the screen.

What I am going to do at this point is not to try to create a formal treatment directly, but to just get my own ideas about how I have seen this story as a film project on paper, and send them to you “undigested” so to speak. As I said on the phone last week, I think the position in which I can be most valuable to the project is to be a consulting assistant at the left ear of an experienced historian screenwriter who has worked with the producer before, and knows how he thinks and works, and who is prepared to live and work with him daily for the year or two it will take to make a motion picture of this scale.

To begin with, I have not yet read Angie’s new story, but I do not see it or the “My Heart” book as being material to this project. I see this as about bringing “Blood Of Montenegro” to the screen in a manner that does credit to that book as being the best personalized lyric history of the rise and fall of Yugoslavia from the point of view of the Muslim minority in print, in English or Bosnian. The only thing close is the work of Milovan Djilas, Tito’s closest friend, and that doesn’t have the depth of history or breadth of viewpoint we do.

From the very beginning of the book project, we visualized and organized this story to move in three cycles, not a trilogy precisely, nor simply a three-act, but three movements, as would be appropriate for a three-part television mini-series, such as might appear on HBO or The History Channel.

As a three-part, this is the story of three generations of men, represented by Angelo’s grandfather Ebrahim Vukelj, an Ottoman officer, his father Halim Koljenovic, a Communist revolutionary, and Angelo himself, an American.

Though I can visualize various actors playing lead characters, I don’t have much of a “wish list” for casting power players. Ebrahim is the gentler and most conservative of the three men, and I might see Ewan McGregor well cast there. Halim is harder, darker, more serious, and someone like Colin Farrell might be well cast. I would probably cast Angelo with a leading European actor, though a strong new face like Eric Bana (Troy) would work well. Top of my wish list is Director Emir Kosturica (Underground), who could do it on location and in both languages, and whose films about Yugoslavia have very much impressed me.

The alternative as a film project, it seems to me, would be to select from the book only one time frame, one principal protagonist, and one plot cycle, and to do a two-hour feature film, with only as much historical backstory as necessary. Presumably, that would Angie’s life, beginning with the funeral in Chapter One, and his father’s arrest, then moving directly to his life as a young man in the Army, leaving Yugoslavia, with only as much historical backstory as is necessary. His rise to success in America would be act two, and the challenge of meeting his (fictional) daughter and action of his return in the Bosnian war the conclusion, as it is with the book. If you believe this would be the better way to go, rather than trying to do the whole book as a mini-series, please let me know, and I’ll “re-program” the brain in that direction.

I’m going to start by writing some character sketches of the principals in each of the series, and basic breakdown of the major actions and locations in each one. Your feedback, questions, ideas, and suggestions are most welcome, and I hope we can make some rapid progress in correspondence here.
Best regards,
James

Urednici

Saradnici