Joshua Marston

It is different. It’s not a linear as Maria’s journey with an obvious end point, but there is a suspense in what do you do when you’re stuck? What is at stake if you go out?

Yeah, part of the challenge is how do you be true to the experience of getting bored and being fed up and how do you not make the audience feel bored and fed up.

You find plenty of ways to mess up the house.

That’s one thing. The other quandary in making the film as you point out is it doesn’t have necessarily an end point. The truth of the matter is the same events depicted in the film could have taken place over a period of years, and probably would have taken place over a period of years. It just wouldn’t have been as compelling so that is in some senses one of the slight cheats of the film. In fact time is compressed. Really the conundrum is how do you make a film that feels like it is moving steadily towards an endpoint when the subject is precisely a story where the problem is that there is no apparent endpoint anywhere on the horizon. These families, these kids, that’s their frustration is that there is no end to the situation.

We see it in politics all the time. How can you reason with a culture that demands their way at your expense?

Right, well, I guess you could say it’s the culture of the older people. It’s all one culture for them, for the kids as opposed to the adults. How can you reason with a generation that demands its way at your expense? In some respects it’s a generational conflict. It’s a culture conflict in the sense that the kids are of the modern culture and the adults are of this older culture. The Facebook culture is trying to negotiate with the culture of the Kanun.

How can there be resolution when one side does not want resolution? The tradition is stay in your house, or we will kill you and that is the way it must be.

Right, that’s the problem. I’ll give you one example of the perversity of the situation. I visited a family that has been in isolation. The oldest son is now 18, was 17 when I visited them and they’d been in isolation since he was five. His mother was really worried that when he turned 18, he was so fed up he was just going to walk out the door. Indeed, I met him a number of times, I kept going back to visit him and at one point we went back and I said, “How are you doing? What’s new?” It’s hard to ask someone what’s new when they’re stuck in the house and someone’s trying to kill them. To my shock and surprise he said, “Oh, I got my driver’s license.” I said, “How did you get your driver’s license?” “I was sick of staying inside so I got on my bicycle and I’d ride across the city and take lessons and eventually I took my test.” He holds up his driver’s license that he got. You can’t get any more poetic or symbolic than that, a kid who’s stuck in the house having a license to go out and about. I said, “I thought you couldn’t go out of the house.” He said, “Oh no, I can go out of the house. They never forbid me from going out of the house. They just said that if they saw me out of the house they’d kill me.” So that’s how you fight against it is you defy it. You do what the character does and breaks out of the house in the middle of the night.

I have issues with family anyway. I feel there can be an oppressive nature to it in the first place, and I’m dealing with a very first world set of dysfunctions. Does the blood feud speak to the underlying problems with a reverence towards family and traditions in general?

I don’t know if I’d use the word problem. I’d say the plusses and minuses. There’s no question that part of what makes the blood feud situation in Albania impressive is that it’s not directly an eye for an eye. It’s not one for one. It’s not just that if you kill someone, someone will kill you. It’s not even just that if you kill someone, someone will kill your son. It’s if you kill someone, someone might kill your first cousin or someone might kill your second cousin. In that respect, Albania is a different incarnation of what we think of as revenge. So being a member of a family in Albania, while it brings all the benefits of an extended support system and so on and so forth, it also means that you're apt to pay for the crimes and misdemeanors of some distant family member who you may not even get along with or see on a regular basis. I met a family that had been in isolation for 15 years, had four sons, the oldest son was 14 which meant that none of the kids had ever gone to school. The two parents had been out in front of the house gardening five years earlier and someone from the family on the other side of the feud came by and shot at them in their garden and put them both in the hospital. After a few months they got out of the hospital and they were back inside living in the house with their kids and they never went out of the house. This was because a cousin of the father’s had killed someone. They’re not even on speaking terms anymore because of course he gets pissed off at his cousin for fucking up his family life but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s still stuck inside the house. Because you can’t go to the other family and say, “I renounce my cousin. Don’t blame me. He’s a stupid idiot for killing your brother.” Blood is still thicker than water.

The ultimate conundrum, as the grandfather expresses in the film, is it causes pain for his side too. Why would they perpetuate a system that is mutual pain?

Because you’ve been dishonored. Because it’s a question of what’s more painful? For him the pain is a different form of pain. For him the pain is the pain of losing a son. For him the pain is that there is still vitriol and venom in his family, people still talking about it. And for him the pain is also that in the community he’s been dishonored. In Albania, if someone in your family has been killed, and you have not yet killed in response, then your family is considered to have lost face. So if for example you are out drinking or you are at someone’s house and drinks are being served, you are supposed to be served in a way that has to do with the way you pour the glass. Some say under the knee and there is a very specific way that you pass the glass, but you’re served in a manner that is representative of the fact that your family has lost standing in the community. So everyone knows when you’re out at a bar having drinks that you have a debt that you haven’t collected. Until you collect your debt, you can’t recuperate the standing that you’ve lost.

There is a philosophy of healing. I always think about how even Holocaust survivors have been able to grow up and forgive. Do you think there’s hope that this philosophy of healing can come to Albania?

Of course. Yes, there’s no question that there are a lot of Albanians who want to move on from this. The government is working hard at getting rid of blood feuds, but it’s more complicated in Albania than you might otherwise thing. It’s not just can you get over the pain of having lost your son or your brother and forgive the killer? It’s also can you get over the fact that everyone in the community is looking at you as a wimp for not taking revenge? Can you rise above it? Forgiving might look like that cowardly thing to do. So that’s very difficult to step out of that system and say, “I’m not going to worry about what everyone in my community thinks about me. I’m going to forgive this person and be the better person and move on.” That’s difficult.

Of course it’s difficult. Would it also be a matter of seeing the big picture, that if you do this, you will have a better life than if you follow the blood feud system?

Well, it depends on how you define “better life.” You might have a worse life if everyone is laughing at you behind your back every time you go down the street to buy your bread at the store. You might have a worse life if every time you go to the pub to have a drink, someone is literally passing your glass under their knee which is a way of saying, “You coward, you haven’t done anything about the fact that your son was killed.”

The positive could be getting to be more productive than obsessing and looking for people on the street. Just to discuss it philosophically.

It’s not for me to say. That’s a question you have to pose to an Albanian to be honest. But I wouldn’t want to represent that all of Albania is forever stuck in this and will never ever get out, but I also don’t want to say that it’s easy and they’re idiots for not just stepping out of it. I’ll give you another example of why it’s complicated. Part of the reason that Albanians are in blood feuds to begin with is because they don’t trust the state. They don’t trust the police to actually go after a murderer. They don’t trust the court system to actually keep someone in jail because they might bribe their way out. So they say we’re going to take justice into our own hands and we’re going to refer to the Kanun and we’re going to kill in response. So the problem is that people don’t trust the state. If you’re the state, how do you resolve this? You say obviously we can’t send some state administrator in, so we’re going to in some way support thee mediators, these elders in the community who have more legitimacy and sway and will be listened to. So how can you support these mediators? Part of the problem is the mediators have nothing to live on so they ask money from the families, but the families who are stuck inside the house are impoverished and they can’t afford to hire the mediators. So no one is working on their cases and they languish and there’s no possibility of brokering peace. So clearly the mediators need to in some way be supported. So you think, well, the state could give a subsidy to the mediators so they don’t have to get money from the families. That would seem like a really logical thing for the state to do. But if the state pays the mediators to resolve conflicts and the mediators are referring to the Kanun, then effectively the state is saying the Kanun has equal standing as our constitutional set of laws. So they’re legitimizing a completely antiquated legal system that has no standing. So what’s the state supposed to do? How does the state resolve the problem? It’s a weird contradiction.

It reminded me of the Israeli/Palestine conflict actually when I watched it, it’s that complicated.

Yeah, it is that complicated but hopefully over time a couple things will happen. Some of them are good and some of them are bad. One is that hopefully the democratic constitutional institutions will get stronger and people will trust the state more and the state will do a better job of executing justice. Another thing that will happen is that there will be more influence from outside, either via the internet and Facebook or cable/satellite TV or because the younger generations are all going off to places like Toronto and Italy and Greece and London to work and make money. Then eventually they come back and they have the influence of other cultures and other ways of doing things. That’s a good thing in the sense that maybe they won’t be as likely to refer to the Kanun and Albanian systems of justice, but it also is saying that they’re giving up Albanian culture and heritage. That’s the conundrum is that part of this is also heritage and culture.

Do you speak Albanian?

I do now. I learned it. When I started doing research for the project, I got Albanian on tape and started learning.

Was that necessary to direct Albanian actors?

Yeah, and also it was just enjoyable. That’s part of the fun of going to a foreign place is learning a language. I’d say by the end of it I was conversational. I could communicate with the actors.

Did you learn Spanish the same way for Maria Full of Grace?

No, Spanish I already knew. Spanish is much easier.

How did you become aware of the Albanian blood feuds?

From reading about them. L.A. Times, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Times of London. Pretty much if you Google “Albanian blood feud” you’ll find hits in the newspapers.

Are there American subjects and issues you’d like to explore?

Oh, yeah. There was an adaptation of a book called The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem that I tried to get off the ground. There was an adaptation of a This American Life piece that I was going to do with Fox Searchlight. There was a piece for J.J. Abrams that I was trying to do and I just wrote a new script that takes place in the United States. Ideally I would say every other film should be in some far away interesting place, and there are lots of other films that were supposed to be in between Maria Full of Grace and this one but sadly because of the system, I couldn’t get them off the ground.

How do you have an acclaimed first feature and still have trouble getting a one made for seven years?

That’s not news. I’m not the first person to fall into that trap. Seven years is a long time but it’s just one end of a margin that is sadly common.

What’s the subject of your new script?

Something that I’m not going to talk about at the moment because it’s still too new.