Emergent: Goran Dukic

Hometown: Zagreb, Croatia
Listening to lately: The White Stripes, 89.9 FM Los Angeles public radio
Fun fact: The character, Eugene (Shea Wigham), is based on Dukic's friend, Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello. The gypsy rockers even provided the music for Eugene's band in the film.

Most people are afraid to say the word “suicide” in polite company, not to mention making a film that engages the subject directly. But first-time feature filmmaker Goran Dukic had no reservations about adapting Etgar Keret’s novella Kneller’s Happy Campers—the story of an afterlife created exclusively for suicide victims—into the dark comedy Wristcutters: A Love Story. “All subjects should be free to discuss,” Dukic says matter-of-factly. The film, starring Patrick Fugit (Almost Famous), Shannyn Sossamon and Tom Waits, (with a cameo from Will Arnett) somehow approaches suicide with both humor and compassion.

“Everything’s the same here; it’s just a little worse,” main character Zia says after cutting his wrists and then finding himself in an unexpectedly familiar afterlife. “I’ve thought about suicide again, but I’ve never tried it. I didn’t want to end up in a bigger shithole than this one.”

In order to relay this sense of “the same, only worse,” Dukic carefully planned the film’s setting. “Every location was a little bit damaged,” he says. “We tried to create this world that’s not really comfortable.” The film was shot mostly in downtown Los Angeles, and the setting isn’t far off from the seedier parts of any metropolitan city, only the bars and streets seem dirtier, and the people seem sadder.

Dukic’s characters work at pizza joints, live in apartments and shop for groceries. They’re in dysfunctional relationships, and they face everyday struggles. We even see an entire family of suicide victims—mother, father and two sons. In a poignant dinner-table scene, the father says, “Not every family is as lucky as we are.” Since the characters are so realistic, Dukic made a few distinct adaptations to the story to emphasize the absurdness of a world populated only by suicide victims. There are no stars in the sky of this Great Beyond, and nobody smiles. Characters remember smiling in their former lives, and they want to smile, but it’s physically impossible. “In a story you can say people are emotionally damaged,” says Duckic, “but in a movie you have to show it.”

To further distinguish between the afterlife and life on earth, Dukic incorporates suicide flashbacks. Before the opening credits, we see Zia methodically clean his room before slitting his wrists over the bathroom sink, slowly falling to the floor and dying. We see Eugene, a rock star, electrocute himself on stage. We see a teenager overdose on pills. It’s uncomfortable to watch, to say the least, but essential for understanding the characters.

Dukic argues that the spirit world he created may not be as absurd as it seems. When most people think about what happens to dead people, they picture clouds and angels, pits of fire or complete nothingness—something drastically diΩerent from the world in which we live now. But Dukic doesn’t think we can get away from our problems so easily. “If there is anything out there, wherever people go after they commit suicide, they will go with the same problems they tried to get away from,” he says. “That’s why I think people should work on their problems in this life - so they don't have to work on them in the future."