Little did I know that the only English he actually knew were the words “Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”
Because when I said “Action!” he rang the bell and instead of saying “Closing time! Closing time!” he said, “Clogy bibe! Clogy bibe!”
“Cut and print it,” I said.
I figured I didn’t have time to find another Yugoslavian to play the guard, and it was the last shot of the day. I thought I could always get somebody to dub it in English during the post-production. I don’t think I ever did, and I think to this day if you pay close attention to the museum guard as he passes a small group of the twelve chairs you will hear him say, “Clogy bibe! Clogy bibe!”
I went all over Yugoslavia mimicking Russia. Having seen pictures of Moscow, I was able to duplicate those same architectural features in Belgrade. It really worked. I created a street sign that I thought should have been posted somewhere in Russia at that time. The oldest part of the sign is faded and overgrown by ivy and used to read CZAR NICHOLAS AVENUE. Underneath it is a newer sign that reads MARX, ENGELS, LENIN & TROTSKY ST.—but Trotsky is crossed out. It’s my own private joke, in one single street sign I covered the entire history of the Russian revolution.
Part of the reason we chose to shoot in Yugoslavia was that I got a great deal in terms of our production budget. In film production, “above the line” costs refer to the separation of production costs between script and story writers, producers, directors, actors, and casting; and “below the line” is the rest of the crew, or production team. Our below the line was $450,000 for everything—the crew, the cameras, the trucks, the equipment, the lights, the scenery, and the costumes. And I was blessed with a wonderful Yugoslavian crew. They were efficient, technically up to snuff, and had a great work ethic. I had little or no trouble with them except for one day…
* * *
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Like I said, the Yugoslavian crew were good-natured and helpful, but you had to be careful. And on this one day I wasn’t.
We were shooting in Dubrovnik, a beautiful city on the Adriatic Sea. We kept missing a group shot either because of the camera position or the wrong lens or something. We were losing the light and I got crazy. In a fit of pique, I hurled my director’s chair into the Adriatic.
Suddenly, from the crew all around me angry voices were heard and clenched fists were raised. Absolutely all work stopped. I turned to my cinematographer, Djordje Nikolic, and asked, “Djordje, what the hell is going on?”
He said, “The crew is very upset. It seems you have thrown the people’s chair into the sea.”
“It wasn’t the people’s; it was my director’s chair!”
“Yes,” he said. “But it was provided to you by the people.”
In a much lower voice, he whispered in my ear, “Mel, you’re in a communist country. Everything here belongs to the people.”
I said, “Djordje, please tell them I’m sorry. Tell them I apologize profoundly for throwing the people’s chair into the sea. I will never do anything like that again.”
He told them that, and they broke into applause. Djordje suggested we all have a drink to celebrate our restored friendship. We poured Vinjak （a powerful Yugoslavian brandy） into shot glasses and toasted one another, embraced one another, and that was the end of work for that day—we were all drunk as skunks. But we ended the day on a good note.
Another benefit I got out of making The Twelve Chairs was that I saw places and met people and learned things that I probably never would have if I didn’t make a movie in Yugoslavia. Most Americans, when they go overseas to Europe they may visit “important” cities like London, Paris, and Rome. Very rarely would they sidetrack to places on the other side of the Adriatic like Yugoslavia or Albania. It really expanded my knowledge of the world.
I even learned a little of their language. For instance, within Yugoslavia there were differences in language for even simple words like “bread.” In Serbian bread is gleb. However when I went to Dubrovnik, which is in Croatia, the Croatian word for bread is kruch. It also helps to learn simple words like “please,” which is molim in both languages. In America, before we say “Action!” when shooting a movie we sometimes say “Roll ’em!”
So when I was in Yugoslavia, to the delight of the crew, before I said “Action!” I would yell, “Roll ’em, molim!”
There were other phrases like “give me more” or “give me less” that were very important when ordering dinner. For more you’d say vi?e and for less it’s manje. But I think the most important word that I learned above all was polako, which probably saved my life every time I took a taxi. The minute you got into a Yugoslavian taxicab, the driver would floor it and you’d be flying at eighty miles an hour in a tin can with wheels.