Monday | 21. July. 2014

PULA CONVERSATIONS: Kristijan Milić

Kristijan Milić, director of the feature-length film Number 55

The film occasionally gives the impression of a magnificent war spectacle, something rarely offered by Croatian film industry. How difficult was it to achieve that?
I personally wanted to finally make a real action film that we would not have to feel embarrassed about for any reasons whatsoever. If it hadn’t been for the incredible enthusiasm of the crew and the actors, it would have been impossible to make the film. Of course, that answer applies to a large majority of Croatian films.

Why the title Number 55?
That’s the house number of a house in which most of the film is set.

How was the film conceived?
Almost seven years ago I was invited by Branko Schmidt and Domagoj Burić, the then director of the Croatian Radiotelevision Programme, with an idea to make a television mini-series about the Croatian War of Independence. After talking to screenwriters Ivan Pavličić and Robert Roklicer we concluded that it would be better to make a serial comprising sixty-minute films because we wanted to cover all battlefields. This was supposed to be the first episode of the serial but eventually it turned into a full-length film.

How hard did you stick to the true event that the film is based on?
The film was inspired by a true event but nobody knows what exactly went on in the house number 55. Screenwriter Ivan Pavličić had a very ungrateful task. He simply had to invent a large part of it, holding on to some basic key elements of the real story. As in any such film, we decided to adapt or even completely change some facts.

Did you contact the participants or their families while you were making the film?
I had contacted some of them a few months before the filming started, but most of them after completing the film. This was a conscious decision that we made as soon as we realized that the film would not and could not be a faithful reconstruction of the true event.

Where did you shoot the film? When? How long?
We shot it in the village Ruča in the vicinity of Veleševec, between Velika Gorica and Sisak, in October and November last year. The shooting lasted 45 working days, about seven weeks.

Janko Heidl