When societies are in transition, as Albania is and has been for the last twenty years, all sorts of weird and interesting juxtapositions come up. And those juxtapositions are just fascinating, dramatically.

This is your second film not in English. Do you find yourself at a disadvantage when you’re directing a movie in a language you don’t speak? Not at all. For one thing, it’s just fascinating for me as a filmmaker to use my film work as an excuse to go into other cultures and learn about other worlds, and then try and take what I’m learning and transform it into a screenplay. When I’m actually directing actors in another language, there’s an interesting thing that happens. If you don’t understand every word of the text that’s going back and forth between actors, you tend to pay more attention to the subtext, to the body language and to the feeling that’s going on between them. And many times that’s more informative as a director.

Did you write it in English?
Yeah, I wrote it in English with an Albanian co-writer, an Albanian filmmaker who lives here in New York. He and I traveled to Albania together and spent a month doing all the research. In the course of that month-long trip interviewing all these people in relation to blood feuds, I realized that it would make sense, since he and I were discovering the story together, to invite him to co-write with me. Since his English was a lot better than my Albanian, we wrote the script together in English. Once it was close enough to what we were going to shoot, we had it properly translated into Albanian. And then the actors, of course, took all of their dialogue and shaped it further.