Leon Lučev is one of the best-known actors in ex-Yugoslavian countries. Whether he acts in comedies like WHAT IS A MAN WITHOUT A MOUSTACHE by Hrvoje Hribar or heavy dramas like GRBAVICA: ESMA’S SECRET, both audience and professionals have positive reactions what can be proved with the list of the awards he reacieved for his acting. 

Tonight, audience will have an opportunity to see Leon Lučev in THE LOAD by Ognjen Glavonić in Competition program – feature film and in MINER by Hanna Slak in BH Film Program tomorrow. 

While you are waiting for the films, read what Leon has to say about his acting, films that made a mark on him and new film adventures. 

 

When you think of the moment when you started acting, what is the first thing that crosses your mind? Do you remember the first moment, the moment in which it all started? 

No. Acting was never in the focus of my interest. I came to Zagreb to study Traffic. My girlfriend at the time wanted to study Directing and I went with her. I saw the call for audition there and decided to try it. That was probably the most important audition of my life. The process lasted for 15 day and from 350 people who were there at the beginning, only 11 of us stayed. I thought: “This is interesting, people love me here.” So, everything started from the need for love. A I was pretty ill at the time, I couldn’t do the physical theatre, so I decided to do the easier thing – enrol at the Academy. All of that was a part of my recovery. I was admitted right away. I would have never chosen myself, but there was some madness, some courage that helped me and I was in. For a long, long time I was not sure why I’m doing what I’m doing. 

 

Do you know it now? 

Every now and then I ask myself if acting is something I’m interested in, because I see that the way I feel about acting is different from how most of the professionals feel. And that is difficult for me, because I have a very professional approach, but I’m not a professional. And I will never be. However, questioning myself through myself through acting is very important to me, as well as decisions that I make, which are based on some other needs. Every now and then I make a decision: “I’m gonna start acting seriously now and I’m going further with it all.” This is one of those moments. This is the first time that from the depth of my being I feel a need to manifest everything I can through acting. The same way I felt about writing and teaching, sharing some points of path I crossed. Acting is very dangerous art, because it can stand in for the reality and you start running in it from your own life. In one moment of my life I started thinking about it and I thought: “There are so many unknown things that I went through through acting. I needed so much endurance, so my patience, so much faith… Let’s try and do it in my everyday life.” That’s when the mess in my life started because I realized how tricky it all is. Jelena, my partner, asked me in Cannes: “Why are you here? What are you doing here? What is your need?” And I think I found a very nice reply to it. I told her I feel a need to meet the people who will push me over my limitations, because I have a feeling I can give a lot, but I need to work with people who will make me cross the boarders in which I feel safe, in which I’m an actor, in which I’m some other person, something else. I feel the need to break it all open and go to some new places that are unknown to me. Then, as always in my life, people who can help me with it started showing up and they are very important to me in this period of my life, because I can feel them. I feel them on a level which is not the level of the role, level of some position, but much more important, on the level of being, because on the level of my being I feel: “What madness this creature has. That could fit naturally.”

 

How much did acting help you with dealing with your private matters, in your development? Or did it help at all? 

It did, because it put me in touch with dreams. And the fact that dreams can become reality. It put me in touch with the silence, in touch with the peace, in touch with the faith. At the same time, it put me in touch with escape from reality, which is also very tricky, but it brought me to decision to come back to reality, at the same time, but not the same reality, reality that I will create. There were moments when I was completely crazy, but I considered myself normal all the time. Few days ago, I was talking to the people from the island and they always tell me: “You were the kid, you were the wildest one.” And at one point I looked at them and said: “Because I was the wildest one, I am where I am.” If I wasn’t the wildest one, I would be obedient, and I would be there. Because I wasn’t, I went far. And I’m gonna go even further. I’m going back to that “wildness”, to the wilderness, because I need it, because I need that kind of wildness, because it is something true, something that is mine. 

 

HOW THE WAR STARTED ON MY ISLAND is considered as your first serious project. You acted in comedies after that, but most of the people actually know you for your serious dramatic roles. What is the difference in working for these two genre and making those two kinds of characters? 

I don’t think there is the difference between comedy and drama, it is the same for me. I always work in the same way. When you think of it, the more drama you manage to put into the comic character, the funnier he will be, because we are laughing from the distance. It is hard for us to look into the mirror and see the fool, it is much easier to watch the comedy and say: “What the full this guy is, nothing like me.” For me, personally, my most important role is character of Vuko in BUICK RIVERA. I went so deep into my subconsciousness while doing that character that people started asking: “Who is this? There is a bit of that in me, too, a bit of that madness.” That is something that is precious to me. In my life I walked several paths, people know me for the one that has to do with acting and for them the story ends with: “yes, he’s an actor.” But my acting carrier is consequence of all the things I do in my other parts of life. 

 

What is acting for you? 

For the last fifteen, twenty years I’m exploring what acting is. I was exploring therapeutic acting and lots of other acting techniques which always had something to do with imagination, dreams, creation and I created some kind of my own educational approach to people, that is considered very unconventional while I was involved in acting cause-and-effect way. That means that I am not interested in made-up structure of the identity of an actor, but in what lies beneath and what parts of himself he hasn’t opened yet. Opening, excepting those parts of yourself increases the capacity of what you play, not of acting. I am trying, through what I feel, what I went through and what I can go through with people help people widen their capacities, help them expend their freedom, to let themselves wonder in some parts of their unconsciousness. And yes, from the point of view of the system that is unconventional, but I don’t feel the need to teach people acting. People are acting perfectly in their everyday lives that there is no reason to teach them to be good actors, they are acting parents, sons, mothers, directors, producers. Those are all roles. Perfect ones. I am interested in how they can expand their roles and question them a bit at least. 

 

When we talk about questioning the roles, characters, identities… It is interesting that you are the man who had an opportunity to get to know Bosnians in very specific way. Through the characters you played you got to learn about some of the deepest fears and traumas of Bosnians and Herzegovinians: you played a man who is trying to survive in post-war Sarajevo in GRBAVICA: from ESMA’S SECRET, modern flight controller, with modern problems in ON THE PATH, to THE MINER who has to deal with the trauma of Srebrenica massacre. Of how much help is that process for someone to understand the wider contest, a place and people? 

I am a very simple man, I don’t question that in that way. Even when I’m playing a Bosnian, I’m playing a human being that grew up at some place and I’m always interested who is that human being. Identity comes later through the speech, through music, but who is that human being really? That is what matters, and identities are imposed to human beings. Bosnia was my second home at one time and that is the place that was making a kind of mess in my head until I got over that kind of identity: I am a Croat, a Serb, a Muslim. I am sick of identities, I watch two identities fighting and to man suffering underneath. 

Biggest breaks in my life I lived through Bosnia, Serbia and all the places I went to. I got prizes for acting in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro. In all republics of ex-Yugoslavia. I’m only missing Macedonia. Acting has no identity, artist has no identity. Art has no nationality. Art has nothing to do with it all. I’m glad that I was involved in all those films in the past ten years, but it is time to step back now, THE LOAD was the last one. Serbs, Croats, Muslims, all of them can discover their truths without me. When I think of it, I acted in all the films that were showing the dirty laundry. I worked on the honestly, did everything I could, believed in them. Audience watched them, they were touched by them and nothing changed. 

And Bosnia, to go back to it… For me, Bosnia is love. Besides being the love, it is mahala, besides being mahalait is made of all those groups… but I have people I love there, and I will always love them, people I hug, and I’ll always hug them, people I don’t hug any more, but one they I might again, people I loved and now they are just acquaintances. Dynamics change. My blindness, my idealisation, my disappointment, my reality, a lot of it is connected to Bosnia. And I love coming to Bosnia. I love Sarajevo, which changed so much in the past 20 years, but everything changes. I met some great people there. I love some of those people for 15 years already. I was laughing with Luna several days ago and I told her: “Can you believe, I know you since you were 13.” We grew up together and we love each other a lot and we talk all the time. And then, there are people with whom relationships end.