Quotes from Emir Kusturica

I started moving towards Serbia when I felt my country, Yugoslavia, was being taken away from me. My feeling of nationality was not as strong as those around me who were attaching themselves to these absurd new entities.

The most difficult part of making movies is to keep making them. Maybe, you could make the biggest hit in the world, but then the big problem is what to do next and how to maintain devoted to a certain instinct that I have about films.

When you make movies the way I do, you invest everything you have. And you do it like a crazy maniac.

In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernize, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things.

I was a big fighter when I was younger. In bars I was ready to explode and fight.

Yugoslavia was a kind of superpower. Great movies. Beautiful novels. Great rock-and-roll. We became a superpower in basketball. The problem is that people needed to identify more strongly with it after Tito and his awful, tricky way of leading the country.

I'm just a troublemaker.

Every time I'm shooting a movie I want to kill myself. Because I don't see the light in the end of the tunnel.

I've reached the 50th year of my life, and now every question related with life also includes thinking about death. When I leave, I want to leave to my offspring a clear idea about identity.

I am somebody who respects Putin highly, but I'm not somebody who is against America.

I am a living illustration of Bosnian mixing and converting. My grandparents lived in eastern Herzegovina. Very poor. The Turks came and brought Islam. There were three brothers in the family. One was Orthodox Christian. The other two took Islam to survive.

My father was always saying we were Serbs, but I didn't pay much attention.

Just because I believe in the identity and integrity of my country doesn't make a xenophobe or a nationalist.

Making movies is a dangerous job. Because you are always the one who stands at the center of the universe when making movies.

I am not trying to say I'm a genius, but 'Underground' was the strongest attack there has been on Milosevic. It is about a man who locks his friends in a cellar for 40 years and convinces them that the war is still going on. He uses them, but they still think he is a great guy. And this was shown in every cinema in Serbia.

I think the city is the strongest social memory organ of humanity.

I know it is crazy, but I want to create a place where people can come in an organised way to think differently, to think their own thoughts.

I am my best enemy.

I've been around some very famous people, but no one has the effect Maradona has; people tremble in his presence.