How do you see short film? What does it mean to you?

For me short film is simply film, I do not make distinctions based on length. The most successful films draw you into their world just as much as feature films, while ‘the best of the best’ create a sensation equal to watching a great fiction, animated or documentary feature. Many of our best directors, including the ones who are no longer with us, made some of their most impressive works in short or mid-length formats.

Why does short film matter? What are its greatest strengths and virtues?

It matters because it is film. A film can convey all sorts of experiences, states and visons, it can communicate a message, convince the viewer, motivate people to try out something for themselves, to let out their frustrations – so many things. The advantage of short film is that, if you know what you are doing, you are able to realize that initial idea more quickly. You don’t have to wait for years to start shooting, exhausting your script and idea in the process. The incubation period is much shorter and that can be a blessing, because you will not get to the point where you lose your enthusiasm and momentum, and you can go right ahead to shooting.

What is your favorite short film and why?

The answer to this changes all the time depending on my mood, sometimes it is a fiction film, sometimes a documentary or animation, or a hybrid film, there are no rules. A short film that made a strong impression on me lately is Patrick Vollrath’s Everything Will Be Okay. It is a story about a divorced father who takes his daughter over the weekend and literally kidnaps her from his ex-wife. The acting is superb and I highly recommend it.

Your short film Summer Fruits won numerous recognitions over the past year! At last year’s Zagreb Film Festival (the Checkers program) and Tabor Film Festival (national competition) you received special mentions, while just recently, you won the award for best fiction film at Star Film Fest and were awarded for best direction and screenplay at Croatian Film Days. I think congratulations are in order! Can you tell us a bit more about the film? How long did it take you to shoot it? How did you come up with the idea?

Thank you. The film is receiving awards and we are very happy about that. The shooting lasted for five days in June of last year. The idea came out of a need to make a film about my relationships to women that have been important in my live, so I thought it would make an interesting concept if the main protagonist encountered all of them over the course of one summer day. With short film, it is handy to construct a frame and that makes it easier to direct and experiment within it. Parts of the script are ‘fictional,’ while the rest is and an amalgam, a ‘sum’ of fragments and conversations from my past, of certain situations and associations that I remember. I used these ‘fragments’ of the past from different stages of my life to create a ‘fictional’ scene that I hoped would be convincing, and I used the same procedure from scene to scene.

According to the Croatian Film Days jury, “Josip Lukić’s direction is bold, intuitive and measured. He manages to depict both the main protagonist’s world and his disappointing surroundings crammed with frustration, in a balanced and direct way, while indirectly adding nuance to the dialogue in terms of letting go and redefining masculinity.” Was letting go and redefining masculinity your initial idea while writing the screenplay or did that occur later on when you were directing the film?

I did not have a direct intention to do that. I simply write and direct the film the same way I observe the world. If I succeeded in what you are saying, I am, of course, glad to hear it. I do not make distinctions between male or female characters, I simply try to make all of them as layered as possible, with their myriad of states, flaws, attitudes, emotions and expectations. That is also the sort of films I like to watch, in which the characters have depth and past.

And I guess you could say that people in Croatia are pretty stiff and scared of other people’s reactions. We are a small country and quite conservative, so often the most normal human behavior or need depicted on film can seem avant-garde. Experience has taught me that the most hard-edge conservatives are those that seem the opposite at first or second glance. I try not to think about it and just work and film what interests me. If someone is moved by it or they like it, then great.

You are a student of film directing at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. Do you often write your own screenplays? What is more challenging for you, writing a script or directing a film? Which do you enjoy more?

Well, I wrote the screenplays for all the films I have made so far. Directing is definitely more challenging, for purely practical reasons, because it requires better social skills. Some filmmakers write by slowly putting together all the pieces of a puzzle, scene by scene, using a mental association, a line from a song or a book they like, or small details from daily life as a starting point. They write a few pages then leave the script to settle for several weeks, then come back to it again. Personally, I like to think about an idea for a long time, put together scenes in my head and then write it down in one go when the time is right. Then I know that is pretty much “it” and I probably won’t change the central structure of the script after that. At least that is how I have done it so far. The idea comes of its own and if it stays with me for a couple of weeks then I know I should probably make a film about it.

The film Mary, which is available on our platform, is directed by Juraj Primorac and produced by Interfilm. It is also interesting because you appear in it as one of the main protagonists. Do you enjoy acting? Being a student of directing, do you find that acting helps you in your directing? Was this your only acting gig?

Acting actually brought me to directing, when I started acting in Igor Jelinović’s short films. This became a really pleasant and successful collaboration because we started to complement each other wonderfully as actor and director. Jelinović’s The Marjan Hill Day is also available on your platform, and I also acted in his films Ultra and Little Bear, etc. It is a great challenge to put yourself in front of these people you do not know and do something for which there are no rules or regulations, you rely only on your instinct and feeling, while the quality of the performance is completely subjective. Acting brought me a lot of stress and adrenaline; literally, when the camera is turned on, you are on your own and there is no one to hide behind. It is an invasive feeling that can cause a lot of insecurities; everyone is sort of orbiting around you, things depend on you and it can very easily affect your ego. Which is why I understand all the fretting and attention seeking actors and actresses are prone to, but it can also draw out the best out of them in front of the camera. I myself very often behave like a dive when I’m acting.

What I find interesting is that, when you enter this other persona, it is the strangest thing, but it does not feel like you have changed, only later when you look at it, you see that you were totally in the character. When I’m acting, I try to do everything the way this character would do it, I am interested in looking at the world through somebody else’s eyes. I know am always bad at rehearsals, I don’t have the technique down and I don’t do it very often, so it takes me awhile to warm up, which is why the first rehearsals with directors are always funny.

Doing Mary with Juraj was an extremely interesting experience, we did these long rehearsals and the shooting lasted for almost two weeks. I learned a lot about acting, but also about directing and production. I also acted in a film by young and talented Ivan Turković Krnjak, Ognjen Sviličić cast me for his latest film, Sonja Tarokić too, and I also had smaller roles in my own short films and in the student films of my colleagues from the Academy.

This is not your first award at Croatian Film Days – in 2018 you took home the Grand Prix for your documentary Momsy. Do you enjoy directing documentaries more than fiction films? Which do you find more demanding?

All the documentary films that I have done so far were my assignments at the BA in film directing at the Academy: an autobiography, a portrait documentary, and the final documentary on year three. I have come to realize that it is very difficult to make fiction films if you have not directed at least one or two documentaries. Documentary editing is a process that I would definitely recommend to anyone planning on doing fiction film – you learn so much about everything related to filmmaking. You learn to think like a director, you start to see what you might need later on in the editing process, and all of this improves your fiction film directing skills as well.

Currently I am interested in hybrids between documentary and fiction film and I have done two such films in my MA at the Academy, even though they are really fiction films because they have very few ‘docu’ scenes. One of them is White Christmas, which won the award for best short film when it premiered at this year’s Beldocs, and the other one is in postproduction.

Fiction film is still my priority, I lean more towards fiction film and I have directed more fiction, but I am interested in everything, really. Every fiction film is a documentary and vice versa, the lines are so thin! I enjoy all of it while I am making it, because I only decide to shoot a film if I am really drawn to a topic.

Are you currently working on any new projects?

Right now I’m in my final year of MA in Fiction Film Directing at the Academy and I still have to make my diploma short fiction film. I have also finally completed my first script for a feature film based on the idea that has haunted me for the last two years, so we’ll see what happens with that.

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Josip Lukić

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