Miss Sarajevo

Excerpt from "Fools Rush In: A True Story of War and Redemption"
By Bill Carter

The taxi drove me through a myriad of small streets to the outskirts of town. It was overcast and, well, very Irish weather—always threatening to rain. Near the gates to Bono’s home sat a drove of fans, who, when the taxi waited for the gates to open, ran up to the window. Their faces were open and expectant, but when they saw the cab driver and me they frowned and walked back across the road, disappointed. Later, Ali, who was cutting carrots for a home-cooked meal, said, “I don’t know what they are possibly waiting for.” She said it not as a person tired of something, but more with a deep curiosity. I wondered myself, but there they stood in the dark waiting for something.

Present were Bono, Ali, their two children, and Ali’s parents. We ate chicken and vegetables and talked of everything from sport to politics to music. They asked me my plans for the future, a reasonable question but quite honestly one I hadn’t thought of for what seemed many years. As far as I knew, my future plans included going back to the hotel later that night. Perhaps if I rode the lift long enough that woman in the sari would show up again. Beyond that I had no idea.

“So tell me the truth. There must have been a woman,” said Bono with a boyish grin as he used his fork to clear his plate into the sink.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“To stay that long in there it had to be a woman.” Now he was wiping his hands on a towel.

“I guess that makes sense.”

“So come on then,” he said, chuckling.

The rest of the dinner party was waiting as well. I felt caught, wanting to prove my storytelling abilities in an Irish home and at the same time wanting not to open an emotional can of worms to people I didn’t know that well. Still, I felt it was time to come clean with my motivations. Bono had stepped forward and taken a huge chance on my behalf and now I was a guest in his home. It seemed like the time to put all the cards on the table.

“There was a woman but she didn’t live in Bosnia. It was before the war. We were in love and she died.”

There was a brief pause, but it wasn’t awkward, more the silence of giving respect to the dead.

“Was she Bosnian?” asked the father-in-law.

“No. No, she was American,” I said, feeling the sweat beads forming on my forehead.

For the first time I felt vulnerable, as if by exposing my personal story I could now be attacked for everything I had been doing. Still, I could hear myself thinking, I had to stay open to those who had been open to me. It is the agreement of the living. The fuel to take the next step.

Someone poured some wine and soon the conversation shifted direction. Then Bono motioned for me to follow him. He leaped up the stairs, two steps at a time, urging me on so we could watch his new music video. His energy and sudden movements made me feel like we were teenagers escaping from the parents to somewhere we could blow our cigarette smoke out the window.

He waited until everyone at dinner had followed before putting on the video. He seemed nervous; not insecure, just excited. The video was of a song called “Lemon” and the images were of the band wandering around in what could best be described as an abstract visualization of a mathematical equation. They were dressed in modern suits and walking in front of a digital world of clocks, ladders, and transparent ledges that led nowhere. After it ended we put my tape in. Even though it was slightly altered from the day before, it ended the same way it had when Edge had watched it, with a man running across Snipers’ Alley, carrying a handbag, toward a burned-out train.

Quietly stern, Ali’s father said, “Paul”—Bono’s real name—“you have to help this young man.”

“So where are we?” asked Bono, his legs dangling over the arm of the chair.

I told him I was supposed to leave town in two days. Someone in the room sighed and it hung there for a few moments, like thick dust floating through the air.

“I have to tell you I don’t understand what is going on,” I said with some frustration. “Ned is telling me to leave town and yet in Verona we talked about me editing this film. I quite honestly don’t know who to listen to. I don’t know who this thing called U2 is.”

Bono sat up and looked me in the eye. “U2 is five people. Larry, Edge, Adam, Paul, and myself. Everyone else works for us. I pay people a lot of money to make decisions for me. And Ned is one of them. He said he reviewed the tape and didn’t see a film.”

“Ned?” I said. “Well, I can assure you he didn’t watch thirty hours of film, and besides, he doesn’t know what to look for in this footage. I do.”

Bono didn’t hesitate. “OK, you work like the clappers until next Friday at the studio. I don’t care about cost. Use anything you need. Add another five great minutes and shape this up, and Ali and I will come in and watch it. If we like it we will finance it ourselves.”

Stunned but happy to be back on track, I agreed and we shook hands. Still holding my hand he said, “But don’t jerk me off here. Make something we will be proud of in ten years. In twenty years.”

“And what about me leaving?”

“Don’t worry about that,” he said.

Later that same night, in the hallway, he asked if I had a title for the movie. I told him I had a notebook full of titles but none seemed to be working. They were all too obvious and gloomy.

“Didn’t you say there was a Miss Sarajevo beauty contest in the war?” he asked.

I told him there was but I didn’t have any footage of it. All I knew was that women in bikinis strode the catwalk with a banner that said “Don’t Let Them Kill Us” while outside the artillery barrage continued.

“That’s it then,” said Bono. “The title. Miss Sarajevo.”

“I don’t want it to be too poppy. I don’t want to make people think it’s about a beauty contest.”

“It’s the perfect metaphor. Miss. It can be a woman. It can be a city. You call it Miss Sarajevo and I will write you a song.”

“Deal,” I said.

Over the next week, as Stephen and I sat in front of the monitors for sixteen hours a day, we worked under a few guidelines, which I stuck up on yellow Post-its. The main one was that the editing must reflect an element of insanity and surrealism.

The most notable difference was a sudden influx of people to look over what I was doing. Although kind and respectful, everyone had suggestions. Perhaps subtitles would be an interesting idea; start it with radio broadcasts to help the viewer; use a narrator. I told them these were all good ideas and when they left I told Stephen to ignore everything they said. I had already learned in Sarajevo that one key to success was never to listen to the suits, even if they were the ones giving you the money. Especially if they were the ones giving you the money.

They eventually hired a “supervisor,” a pleasant film-maker named Gerry Hoban who stopped in from time to time to check on our progress. I liked him, mostly because he told me he felt uncomfortable interfering with another person’s work. Instead we met in the nearby pub at the end of the evening and drank Guinness and talked about how the film was going.

That Friday, as promised, Bono and his wife came by in the early evening. I had changed the order of the film and added pieces and dropped a few storylines. Stephen had dubbed in some new music. Overall it was a stronger piece and we knew it.

When it ended Bono edged to the front of his seat. “OK, we are in,” he said. “Let’s make a budget and decide what it will take to make it great.”

Although I was excited to get the green light on the project, there was still no promise that it would ever be seen. But something felt right about the work. The act of work. The fifteen-hour days of putting images together in a way that made sense out of senselessness. The voices of friends in Sarajevo who were once just voices in a room were now becoming authorities on something. What? I wasn’t sure yet. I wanted to make a great film, a document that captured the essence of a time, in a place. But in truth it was the promise of more work that felt so good; the hour-by-hour effort of creating something that would last.

Excerpt from "The Beauty of Bosnia" [link]

I went on a history tour around Sarajevo, which was interesting - if nothing more than to see the beautiful city. I found it quite weird though that our tour guide was a guy not much older than myself who had fought in the front line. He chit chatted about all sorts of stuff, but most interestingly he put a real plug in for the Bosnian women. The U2 song "Miss Sarajevo" is just one familiar tribute to the women of Sarajevo, highlighting the fact that despite a full scale war going on outside the Miss Sarajevo contest continued. Aside from the obvious demands of war time for the women it was no secret that from the commencement of the war the women of Sarajevo maintained a simple pact to remain as beautiful as possible for their men. Make-up was one of the biggest black market sellers during the was. The women went quietly about bringing happiness in a pretty grim environment through maintaining pride in themselves, something that appears to have worked very well.