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I am a man with a lot of passion.
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My purpose is to make a movie to make you warm. To give you some heat. Now, this rational world has become a place where only what is cool is good. Do you cut the movie on the basis of the beat of modernity or the basis of the beat of your own heart?
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I was a big fighter when I was younger. In bars I was ready to explode and fight.
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At a certain moment, Yugoslavia stopped being rational, and then you end up going to war.
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What you have now is a Hollywood that is pure poison. Hollywood was a central place in the history of art in the 20th century: it was human idealism preserved. And then, like any great place, it collapsed, and it collapsed into the most awful machinery in the world.
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When I was a student looking at Leonardo DaVinci and all those guys - Italian, Dutch, or whatever - it's incredible how each piece of the painting fits to the main theme that they want to express.
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When you make movies the way I do, you invest everything you have. And you do it like a crazy maniac.
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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.
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I've been around some very famous people, but no one has the effect Maradona has; people tremble in his presence.
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I'm not anti-American. I was raised to love both sides.
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If you say morality is just what you like, you lose the metaphysical level of what in the history of philosophy is called 'categorical imperative.'
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I'm fed up with democracy. In a democracy, people vote for the mayors. I wanted to build a city where I will choose the citizens.
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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.
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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.
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I never wanted an independent Bosnia. I wanted Yugoslavia. That is my country.
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I will not cut my film because, because, because, because of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
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Just because I believe in the identity and integrity of my country doesn't make a xenophobe or a nationalist.
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I put my ideas into practice. That may be the reason people hate me.
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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.
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That is a Medieval way of drawing history, in which they do not respect the law and want the rest of the world to respect the law. That's not possible.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Most people only remember Maradona for the bad parts now. But he was a genius, someone who lifted us and himself up to the level of the gods.