I never wanted an independent Bosnia. I wanted Yugoslavia. That is my country.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Every movie that I do, if you analyze the stories, you can notice that in each story, that within the movie after the first 15 minutes, it could fall apart. Or every 10 minutes it has the chance that you lose the thread. On the other hand, if you succeed in putting them together, then the movie looks spontaneous and more like cinema.