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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

I am finished with cities. I spent four years in New York, ten in Paris, and I was in Belgrade for a while. To me now they are just airports.