“You Can Really Begin to Study Both the Origin of Evil and of Goodness”: ‘THR Presents’ Q&A With ‘Bad Roads’ Director Natalya Vorozhbyt

The writer-director talks about her dramatic anthology about how the war in her native Ukraine has affected the civilians of the Donbass region.

BY JORDAN MINTZER

In an interview with THR Presents, powered by Vision Media, Vorozhbyt explains that before writing her play, which consisted of six chapters, four of which appear in the film, she traveled to Donbass to witness the conflict firsthand. At the time she was casting for another project, which led her to speak with local teenage girls who had been forced to adapt to life in a war zone, with all the horror that entails.

Those conversations make their way into the second story in Bad Roads, while the film’s suspenseful opening section packs all the tension and uncertainty of the conflict into an encounter set at a checkpoint. “It’s an entry point to a new dimension, and that’s exactly how my trip to Donbass started,” says the director. “From a place of peace, you enter something that you’ve only seen at the movies, which is war. And then you can really begin to study both the origin of evil and of goodness.”

The film’s third story is the longest and also the most difficult to watch, focusing on a female journalist (played by Maryna Klimova) held captive by a separatist soldier (Yuri Kulinich), who rapes and tortures her in an abandoned medical clinic. As she fights for her life, the journalist strikes up an extended conversation with her torturer, trying to humanize the two of them in a survival tactic that just might work.

Even if it was born on the stage, Bad Roads has a very distinct pictorial style and sound design that at times recalls Andrei Tarkvosky’s Stalker, which is also set in a zone filled with constant danger and moral ambiguity. “That may have been a subconscious reference for me,” the director concludes, “but the main reference for me was real life, because I was in that zone myself, where I myself was a stalker.”

Even if it was born on the stage, Bad Roads has a very distinct pictorial style and sound design that at times recalls Andrei Tarkvosky’s Stalker, which is also set in a zone filled with constant danger and moral ambiguity. “That may have been a subconscious reference for me,” the director concludes, “but the main reference for me was real life, because I was in that zone myself, where I myself was a stalker.”

Click here to wath the interview: https://bit.ly/hollywoodreporter_vorozhbyt