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I am a man with a lot of passion.
Emir Kusturica -
I was a big fighter when I was younger. In bars I was ready to explode and fight.
Emir Kusturica
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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?
Emir Kusturica -
At a certain moment, Yugoslavia stopped being rational, and then you end up going to war.
Emir Kusturica -
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.
Emir Kusturica -
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.
Emir Kusturica -
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.
Emir Kusturica -
When you make movies the way I do, you invest everything you have. And you do it like a crazy maniac.
Emir Kusturica
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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.
Emir Kusturica -
I'm not anti-American. I was raised to love both sides.
Emir Kusturica -
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.
Emir Kusturica -
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.
Emir Kusturica -
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.
Emir Kusturica -
I never wanted an independent Bosnia. I wanted Yugoslavia. That is my country.
Emir Kusturica
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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.'
Emir Kusturica -
Just because I believe in the identity and integrity of my country doesn't make a xenophobe or a nationalist.
Emir Kusturica -
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.
Emir Kusturica -
I put my ideas into practice. That may be the reason people hate me.
Emir Kusturica -
I will not cut my film because, because, because, because of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Emir Kusturica -
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.
Emir Kusturica
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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.
Emir Kusturica -
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.
Emir Kusturica -
You know, in each segment of ex-Yugoslavia, multi-ethnic life is lost, except I think we somehow still have this in Serbia.
Emir Kusturica -
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.
Emir Kusturica