20/08/2020 Mediterranean film festival
Joško Lokas in the jury of the 21st MFF: Big style comeback
He hasn’t been around the scene for a while, but he has a huge comeback. In addition to his hosting engagement in one of the popular quizzes, 'Chase', he surprised the audience with his work on 'Missing' - a miniseries he authored. Despite the quarantine and restrictions, which he admits he did not cope well with, Joško Lokas is not resting. Besides the second season of the ‘Missing’, he is also preparing new series and his first love – quizzes. This summer, he accepted the role of a jury member at the 21st Mediterranean Film Festival, which was the reason for this interview. *
You know what the situation today is. If you don't have social networks, and unfortunately or luckily, I don’t have those, then nobody knows you exist, or work. But you are right. I disappeared from the screen, but I have been very active behind the camera. I have been designing and producing events for years, and now you know I write screenplays and what I enjoy and love to do is everything related to quizzes.So I accepted the 'Chase' with a lot of caution and I hope for the viewers of it, I made the transition as painless as possible.Fortunately the 'Missing' is not my first production project so I relied on one part of that experience, and as a production company, 'Clinica studio' on choosing the team around the project. When you look at the cast and who is in the project, from director Kristijan Milić, Goran Rukavina to director of photography Mirko Pivčević, set designer Damir Gabelica, makeup Ana Bulajić Črček, costumes of Vedrana Rapić and so on, you will notice that we chose the best of the best for 'Missing'. In doing so, we hoped to create the best possible framework for one such topic.
Since this is a very sensitive topic - the Homeland War, and you yourself have repeatedly pointed out that you are 'afraid' of the viewers' reaction, in the end they were extremely positive. Are you, now with a certain distance, satisfied with what has been done?
Well, the responsibility of the whole team and me was mostly to present the war events of those years as faithfully as possible. The stories based on which 'Missing' were created are the stories of active participants in the Homeland War from the very beginning to the very end, so the whole feeling about creating the series was intertwined with my own emotions to coexist with these people who are my friends and acquaintances.There is no way we can describe the war path of each participant, but if we at least remind some of them, through the series, of those fellow soldiers, those next to them, we succeeded.
Are you ready for the second season?
Yes. The scripts are done, the team is complete and we can start filming within two months because we are staying on Velebit so we know most of the things about the series that is ahead of us.What we don't know is in line with the scenario, and that is inspection of new locations related to the story and what is most important is the introduction of retrospectives on how the war for our six began. In the first season, we talked about them because I got them as stories, and in the second season we show them. What we emphasize is that the stories of the second season are authentic, and we will try to bring them as close as possible to the viewers with the help of fiction.
In addition to the format of the series, you also made a film version of 'The Missing'?
Yes, and I have to admit it looks great. Kris did a good job again. Unfortunately we will still have to wait for the movie version because the project was originally conceived as a miniseries, hopefully in a few seasons.
You are working on another series, and you haven't neglected the quiz team either.
In addition to the second season of 'The Missing', I am also working on the development of the series 'Summer Camp' of about eight episodes, the script of a series of eight episodes in which I am not a screenwriter but as a production company we are project developer. We have advanced the development of a miniseries project and we hope that we will be the ones to do it and the eternal design of the game show format is always there.As a team for quizzes, we have a finished project of the mini quiz 'Solo' and the quiz 'I have a question' and we are developing two projects.One is with Enis Bešlagić, and the other with Tarik Filipović.I also hope that events will be launched so that this part remains in operation.
We came out of the quarantine in which many were forced to take a break - How did all this affect you?
Well I didn’t handle the whole situation very well because, I believe just like everyone else, I react badly to any kind of restriction. However, the good results in dealing with the closure brought confidence that we control the situation. Now we control it in this way and one thing is for sure, we learn something more every day and we deal with it like the whole world, with responsibility.
Are we going to come back to ‘normal’?
I think the way to normal will be a bit longer, but we will put this under control.It will only be devastating if we do not learn some lessons from all this and apply them to the life we will live on.Humans are social beings and someone just showed us the other harder side of it.Everything we shared until then has become digital and with all due respect for high technologies, they can in no way replace the physical presence of our loved ones.You add a sense of loss of freedom to it all and you feel pretty bad there.Freedom is the foundation of everything, and it seemed that it was endangered.
What is certain is that we watched a lot of movies and series under quarantine. Is there anything that thrilled you?
Regarding documentaries, and related to my own inspiration for the 'Missing', there is always good old 'Restrepo', regarding newer 'Last dance' (because I love the NBA), and as far as the series are concerned, we really watched a lot of them under quarantine and many impressed me, but I will list only two, because the list would have been very long… ‘Years and Years’ and ‘Unorthodox’.
*Text published in Večernji list