Top 30 Emir Kusturica Quotes

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?

You know, in each segment of ex-Yugoslavia, multi-ethnic life is lost, except I think we somehow still have this in Serbia.

I put my ideas into practice. That may be the reason people hate me.

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.

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.

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

I am very impulsive and very stupid sometimes, but I am very clean.

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 am a man with a lot of passion.

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.’

If the film is not emotional, then it operates on a superficial level.

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.

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 will always fight for peace. But, unfortunately, it is war that drives us forward. It is war that makes the major turns. It makes Wall Street function; it makes all the bastards in the Balkans function.

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

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

I’m just a troublemaker.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 am my best enemy.

My relationship with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is very clear: respect. We met a couple of times; once I received a medal from him. I respect hugely how he brought Russia back from its knees.

At a certain moment, Yugoslavia stopped being rational, and then you end up going to war.

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.