Nadine Labaki

Did that also help you indicate the humorous side of the movie by turning it into a dance?

Yes, it was important. All these aspects, whether it’s humor or dancing and musical numbers, it was important because this is intended to be a fable. It’s not really a realistic film. With nonprofessional actors, and the fact that they’re acting very real, it has this very realistic approach. But at the same time, it had to be like sort of a fable because I didn’t want to relate it to any specific event. Unfortunately in Lebanon, because we’ve been through so many wars, when you talk about the war, people tend to want to relate it to a specific event and this is not what I wanted to happen. I wanted to be more universal. I’m talking about conflicts in general. I’m talking about the war in general. This conflict could’ve happened between two families or two football teams or two friends. It’s not specifically between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon. And I think the fact that there's musical [elements], it does give you that. The fact that there’s humor also give you this distance. I needed humor to create this distance because sometimes when you laugh about your flaws, it’s a way to start seeing them and maybe to start healing from them. It was an important part also to make the reasons why we get into the conflict ridiculous, to make you understand that sometimes it is ridiculous why we make wars.

In real life have you ever been able to prevent fighting using some of the tactics these women use?

[Laughs] No. No, no, no. I imagined, because it was inspired by true events that happened in 2008, true conflicts. There was conflict between two opposing political parties and then people who were followers of these parties took weapons again and went down to the streets and started killing each other again, after having succeeded in living at least 20 years of peace. At that point I had learned that I was pregnant and I think it does give you a different perspective on life. So I imagined my son if he was 18 years old now and he was tempted to take a weapon, to go down to the street and whatever the rest were doing, what would I do as a mother to stop him? That’s how the whole story started, the whole idea for the film started. So whatever these women are doing in the film are not really true events that happened, but it’s things that I would have imagined doing if I was in that situation.

I would like to think there is a hope for preventing violent conflict, but is it inevitable? The women do everything to hide the news, and an accident still makes them fight. Is conflict inevitable?

It’s not completely inevitable but unfortunately most of the time this is how it happens. I needed to talk about how we misinterpret things sometimes and how rumors can create conflicts out of nothing and how what happens outside can influence what happens inside. And how sometimes we are so eager for conflict that anything is an excuse for us. This was the proof. The cross fell and it broke and it’s even a Christian boy who did it, but the Christians, because they needed somebody to blame, they automatically blamed the Muslims of the village. So I wanted to talk about that. I wanted to talk sometimes how conflicts erupt out of misinterpretation.

Is the issue at heart then that both sides want to have a conflict? Correcting that is the solution.

Absolutely and unfortunately when there has been so much blood between two parties, we haven’t really talked about it. Revenge is inevitable when there has been so much blood, and there has been so much blood between so many parties in Lebanon, that anything can become an excuse to start a war again because we haven’t forgotten, because we haven’t forgiven. Forgiveness is really an important stage and this forgiveness is not something that we did unfortunately in Lebanon. There’s so much blood in the soil of this country and people are unable to forget it. So everything becomes an excuse to start a war again because they want revenge.

I hope they try the busload of women. That was a good plan.

[Laughs] That might work.

Is the movie opening dialogue?

A lot of dialogues. The movie is doing great over there. We’re breaking records. We’re making history and it’s going beyond the film. I’m having talks in universities and schools and doing political talk shows talking about the subject, talking about how we can try to avoid new conflicts. So it’s going really beyond the film and I’m really happy about that.

We don’t get to see a lot of Middle Eastern humor. Is there a lot of humor?

Yeah, of course. I think humor does create this distance. When you laugh about your flaws I think it’s a way to heal. It was important and it’s something that is part of our culture too. We tend to make a lot of jokes, we tend to laugh about our flaws, we tend to use our language in a very interesting humorous way. It’s also part of our personality.

Is it distance it creates? I thought humor brought things closer to me.

Distance in a sense that you do look at things in a different perspective through humor. When you’re laughing about the situation, it’s like as if you are acknowledging that the situation is ridiculous and then you acknowledge that maybe you should do something about it and change it because it is ridiculous. Maybe distance is not the right word for it but it does give you a different perspective on things.

It might depend on the audience, because someone who lived this conflict might need a distance. Someone who’s never experienced it like me might see humor as a way in.

Absolutely, true. That’s true. It does create distance for people who have lived the war. This film is really my way of saying we’ve had enough. We’ve had enough. I don't know one person that hasn’t lived a tragedy, a tragedy related to wars, especially women. When we have family gatherings, I look at the women in my family who have lost children in such absurd and violent ways during the wars. I look at them and say, “How do they do it? How do they manage to keep living?” I’m obsessed with this idea. I don’t want to be in that situation, God forbid. It’s really my way of saying we’ve had enough. We don’t want to go through this again.

In Hollywood, it’s tough for female directors. What is the Lebanese film industry’s attitude towards female directors?

You know, you can’t really talk about an industry. We don’t have a film industry. It’s really cinematic adventures. That’s what I call them. We don’t really have an industry so you do things your own way. It’s not like people give you a chance to do it. You create your own chance and you say, “I want to do it” and you find a way to do it. It’s not like you’re waiting for other people to give you the chance because there’s no film industry. So you do things the way you want them. Even the way I work, I’ve created my own way of working. I don’t work like any other director. My way of working is a bit chaotic but it’s organized chaos because I work with nonprofessional actors and I improvise a lot and I do things I’m not supposed to do and I’m looking for that unpredictable moment of truth all the time. I don’t tell the actors what the scene is until the last moment. It’s really like my own way of working and I created it. I’m not waiting for anyone to give me permission.

Had any of your actors experienced these conflicts in real life?

Everybody. Every one of the actors, everybody that was on the shoot, everybody involved in the film. Everybody has a tragedy related to war so everybody relates, whether actors or even the crew. The atmosphere on the set was just amazing because everybody was aware of what the film was saying and everybody wants to make a change somehow and they believed that what they were participating in was something that could bring change an it made it even stronger. It was a very intense emotional adventure.

How must it feel playing these scenes for pretend when they could be real?

It wasn’t pretend. Most of the time it wasn’t pretend. Most of the time it was we were relating to things we knew very, very well. That’s why I don’t like the word acting very much. I need to believe as a filmmaker that what’s happening is true. The way that these actors are reacting or what they are saying could have happened. They could have said the things they said or they could have reacted this way in that situation. I need to believe that what’s happening is true because I think that cinema can be a very powerful nonviolent weapon to make a change. And it does make a change when you do relate as a viewer. When you relate to what you’re seeing and when you think, “This could have happened to me” or “This could have been me on the big screen” or this story could have been true,” this is when you start relating to your own life or to your own situation and this is when you start thinking, at least thinking. I want you to come out of the film or the movie theater and take this film with you and think about it. Think of the situations and I don’t want you to be in the situation when you know that you’re watching a film with actors and it has nothing to do with your reality and this is a different reality and you go out of the film and you forget it the next minute. Because I do believe that it’s very powerful and cinema can make a change.

Are you rare in Lebanon, a woman who does all of this for herself? Are there a lot like you?

No, I’m rare. There are other women that are directors and there are other directors that are doing very, very good things but like I said, we can’t really talk about the film industry. We are very, very limited and there’s not a lot of filmmakers. There’s a few women filmmakers that are doing good stuff and we are rare as filmmakers.

They don’t have to be directors, but artists or women breaking out.

There are, there are a lot of women breaking out and especially breaking the clichés of Arab women. That’s what’s very important. There’s a lot of interesting women, interesting artists that are breaking these clichés.

Was this a controversial movie to make in Beirut?

It could have been controversial if a lot of people knew about it but I kept it secret until the end. I didn’t give any scripts to any actors. They discovered the scenes most of the time the same day. Of course they knew about the theme but they didn’t really know in detail what we were talking about. I kept it secret. Nobody knew about it, not even the press. They knew I was filming but they didn’t really know what I was filming. It was important to keep it secret until the end.

Here we call that guerilla style.

It’s not really that. We had permissions, we had all of that but I didn’t want a lot of people to know, because when you talk about religion it becomes a very taboo subject and it becomes very delicate and people start interpreting things differently and I didn’t want any of that to happen.

It’s not even specifically about Christianity or Muslim, but just the fact that there is religious conflict.

It’s not really about religion for me. It’s not about Christians and Muslims. It’s about the fact that people are different and people have a problem tolerating this difference. We could have created two new religions. We could have created religions that don’t exist to make it even more universal. But I needed it to make it simpler for people to understand, so when they see a cross, they understand we’re talking about Christians. When they see veiled women, they understand that we’re talking about Muslims, or when they see a mosque. So it was important to make that clear for the viewer, but really we could have created two new, not even religions. Maybe two sects or two parties, or two political parties. It’s mainly about the fact that we don’t tolerate the difference of the other. That’s what I’m talking about.

What’s your next film going to be?

I don't know yet. I haven’t started writing yet. I think I will start writing at the end of the summer, my next film.

Where Do We Go Now? is in theaters now.