CL: You've been talking about nostalgia for days, and I've been thinking how you managed to do that. I congratulate you but ask you, how? How does one manage that, to transfer the right feeling to the screen and create what one wants?

MDJ: I can try to sum it up. It wasn't a pattern that I strictly followed. In one moment I just thought how memories are not a burden but something that's transformative and that you can contrive again. Life, childhood and that early adolescence in Vojvodina gave me a lot of beautiful but also traumatic things, with which I left for Belgrade. Of course, my first film had to be a confrontation with all of that. I thought to myself "I won't let the negative memories be something that bothers me and doesn't allow me to go back there with a healthy energy, I will contrive it once again, through a film." It was literally that kind of a journey. Places in film, interiors are the spaces that meant a lot to me in childhood. I dragged the crew, took them to those toponyms of childhood and said: "Let's make out of this something that will connect me more to the film and less to the memory or to enhance that memory." It was a road through forged memory, since memories are fake - you actually remember the last memory of that memory, and not the real thing. In that sense, it was very cathartic and I think the film reflects that, nostalgia does not appear to be a tasteless and pathetic resentment, but really a travelling into an unknown area, with sincere emotions and a desire to create an inter- space between the film and the reality where it still exists.

CL: You are very critical of the environment you grew up in. The atmosphere... in one moment of her life your heroine has to make a choice what to do with herself; she's expected to open and close the pharmacy her whole life, and not to be free. That is your criticism of Backa, Vojvodina hypocrisy and expectations when it comes to a young person...

MDj: I remember when I was five, I rebelliously decided that I don't want to be a girl who wears dresses and behaves as it's expected, but I will be a boy for a year and I will dress like that which is, I think, an early form of rebellion against the norm. I thought the boys were free because they were rolling in the mud and us girls, we were imprisoned in our dresses. That's the pressure of the environment which from the beginning expects something and starts molding you before you've even been exposed to life itself. I wanted to dive into life and let it define and shape me. Vojvodina is a provincial place, which makes your emotions repressed, your passions dormant, and makes you behave according to established conventions, no matter how contrary they are to your nature. It is a critique of the society, which doesn't allow your personality to develop in a healthy and normal way, without imposing restrictions, guilt, judgment, some kind of contempt. I think that all the things I strived for are actually normal, it's just that the environment created the context in which it was a forbidden taboo, I rebel against school structure, society... I also had a strong empathy for people and relations and I never let that rebellion to be just the consequence of my desires, but I took care that people around me don't suffer and strived to understand them with their weaknesses. And then, a film happens! An ideal way for me to release all of that, without remorse or bitterness, but with an objective view on things. And now it all hurts much less.

CL: What's hard as well, what's visible in your film Disobedient is the search for ourselves and that journey is the hardest and perhaps most painful journey, but definitively cathartic...

CL: Cast members are fantastic. Hana Selimović is most definitely your alter ego... That cast really speaks of how much you thought about how your heroes will be led? I'm talking about Sovilj, but also about Minja Subota, to whom I would like to dedicate this whole question...

MDj: During the work on script and during preparations, I wanted to embrace the life that happened around film, and put it as a part of creative process. Not to judge or disapprove in advance, but to see what life would bring. In that sense, nine months before starting the shooting I decided that Hana and Mladen are going to play in my film. One of basic director mechanisms was that they find out nine months before that they are going to play the characters and they have to live in that world for so long that it starts to hurt them, it's something that affects them and coincides with their life dilemmas and their years. Even though Hana and Mladen were close friends at the moment, and I met them a year ago, it wasn't a path of least resistance because it was easier for me to work with friends. On the contrary, it was kind of a distorting the womb in order to connect with something that defines them and that they weren't in contact with. It was a journey for me as much as it was for them. I'm eternally grateful for their courage, because it's very risky. They can regret it, but have no idea how they will cope with the consequences. So we all jumped into an empty pool, and it doesn't matter how much it will hurt us. I think that's something you feel in the film and it's worth it. Their relationship, their courage and willingness to dig inside themselves to show the vulnerable side outside the defensive mechanisms and outside illusions that we all had about ourselves.

CL: I found the relation between your generation and the characters from your childhood very interesting. It's a kind of awe. Those same characters could have taken them on the wrong path. Minja Subota appears in your film as narrator appears, for example, in Brecht. Why did you opt for that, because Minja Subota could have had a different role?

MDj: I will honestly tell you know how the process went. When I write a script, there's a moment when I feel the pleasure of creative process and immediately an inner sensor is activated which starts to question the matter till the point where it kills my will. Then I realized I should make this censor busy, so he can literally work in my story. Then I started thinking about how my inner sensor looks, what it is, with whom it communicates. It is a sensor of great expectations, and those expectations were given to us in our childhood. A vision of life that you cannot fulfill, but expect from yourself, that horrible strictness you have towards yourself, that makes you unable to breathe, to live... Then I decided to meet a tame and witty version of this model, a picture of life that someone makes in your childhood. Then I met Minja Subota, faced him with the fact that I wrote a script in which he plays one of main roles, not knowing if he wants to accept the role. That film wouldn't have been the same without him. He went with the process unreservedly and played with himself. I love people who are willing to play with their own picture, character, with what they represent... In that sense, I think that was a great clash with the inner sensor. Now I'm friends with him and he isn't some kind of a dark, dreadful force that appears and inhibits me. Now we can talk, make some agreements, when he goes on holidays, when he sleeps, when I work...

CL: How present is he actually? How much did you put him on the back burner? How much did he allow to be put on the back burner?

MDj: Ohh, I thought... I think that now he disguised into something else, who knows how I will find him now. But, in any case there's an idea that, it is not a dark force, but a living man who has his weaknesses, desires, needs with which you can communicate. But I change as well, I'm not making my life any easier, I always set some challenges that bring me closer to some inquietude which, I guess, it's necessary to creatively express myself. Those things make life miserable but at the same time make art possible.