• How did you conceive the project of Mecavnikgrad, « the snowstorm village » ?
  • Emir Kusturica : The village is an idea which was born at the end of the shooting of my last film, Life is a miracle. I was really impressed by the landscapes, by the nature of this region, and I got the idea to gather houses in a new context. A context which allows me to defend myself in front of a world of standardization on the planet. The basic idea is very simple: find houses and create a new situation by putting all these houses together. Moreover, I wanted to underline the relationship between nationality and culture, because this nation which is Serbia has a very strong culture made of symbols and people. I reject the idea that nation feeling is linked to nationalism. It is absolutely not true because, for me, a nationality is a culture above all. In the village, the culture is developed like this : cinema, which has an exclusive form, an art gallery, a sport complex, with a swimming pool and gymnasium, which are still in construction, and a church. The architecture is conceived like in the old times, which means that there is no real plan. Plans are created according to a random development. I’m very happy with the result, to see that so many people receive the message, when they come and they have new behaviors. For example, they taste natural products, such as cherry juice locally made, or boza (corn juice with honey) in place of Coca Cola – which is not served in the bars of the village. Simplicity forces people to have clear and clean behaviors. These small houses don’t give just a romantic idea. People find something very strong here, the idea that the culture is a way of being. First they seek, enter inside and behave according to what the place proposes to them. They must understand this place.
  
  
• You have a precise project concerning the village. You have created a screening room which is absolutely perfect for sound and image. You intend to organize cinema lessons, workshops, etc.
  • EK : Yes, from time to time. I would like to make workshops and to present to some people my personal vision of the cinema. There are no revolutionary ideas, there, it’s just to study the various aspects of the cinema, in order to give a chance to people, not necessarily to make films but specially to open other doors by redefining the cinema under multiple angles.
  
  
• You suggested for the first workshop of this summer the title: « Art is (or isn’t) in a period of transition »...
  • EK : This theme raises the question of a psychology of the situation by defining space and time and not the question of a psychology of individual people. It will be the work of this year to compare the structure of the classical music and what is called classical cinema, that is the cinema before and after the nouvelle vague, which means out of it. It will be specially about the neorealism and the French poetic realism, whose Master is Vigo. I think in the same way, whatever the matter. For example, I can’t separate the cinema from the music, particularly regarding structures. The cinema violently touches the public by its emotional side because its visibility is very pragmatic. The music is a good weapon to underline the structure. And architecture too.
  
  
• You’re going to make these workshops yourself, or ask other directors, even foreigners …
  • EK : This year, I’ll assume the workshops myself, but in the future, I’ll call other teachers, and probably foreigners . I want that people here come from everywhere. The idea is to make this village a meeting place as much international as possible.
  
  
• You said it was as difficult to make a film as to make war, or to play a football match. Had that anything to do with Maradona ?
  • EK : Maradona is a project that unifies many aspects of my own life. Historically, politically and even more. I’m very excited by the idea of discovering the personality of the best football player in the world. On many points, he became a unique case. He is a guy who marks an end to the era of a certain football where the individual had his place. Today, football is a big business and a kind of video game. Maradona remains the last true player that I respect.
  
  
• What about the possible adaptation of the Bridge over the Drina , by Ivo Andric, for the cinema ?
  • EK : I’ll never do it. It’s impossible... I mean, it’s difficult, and I don’t think it’s the moment to make such a work with such a frame. It’s too big ! It’s quite possible that nothing is less sure than that!

Interview by M. L. , translated by Matthieu Dhennin

• What kind of jury president are you going to be?
  • Emir Kusturica : I’m already very happy. Great authors are in competition. If, moreover, the selection gives us the desire to reward unknown directors, it would be truly a splendid festival! Today, the cinema is either very commercial, or very specific. I would be very happy if the jury managed to find the best combination between the two.
  
  
• You often stood against commercial cinema. Does the fact that there is a Hollywood film in competition obstruct annoys you ?
  • EK : Not at all. From Lubitsch to Capra and John Ford, Hollywood has produced some of the authors who counted the most in my education. I don’t protest against Hollywood in itself, but against this world which prevents from thinking, from feeling things, which seeks to impress with technology, by betting all on marketing, while being interested only in profitability.
  
  
• You once said you were born several times, among which once in Cannes. You certainly wanted to speak about the year of “When Father was away on business”...
  • EK : Yes. During the period of Communism and Bolshevism in our countries, Cannes was the only door on which we could knock. And if it opened, it brought an immense echo. I would have never thought that When father was away on business could win anything. I understood gradually, by considering the films I liked which had received the Palm, the Ballade of Narayama, Yol, Paris Texas... They all combine a concern of the audience and a courageous trip in cinematographic aesthetics. It’s also what characterizes my films.
  
  
• You didn’t stay to receive the Palme d’Or...
  • EK : I had left after the projection my film. I didn’t think of deserving such a recognition, and I was too narcissistic to come back without being sure to receive something. But this success marked my life.
  
  
• How ?
  • EK : In the way of being privileged. Obviously, that involves also a great responsibility, and great sufferings, even moments of depression. When you start so high, you can’t be satisfied then if you make small steps.
  
  
• Each time you went in competition, were you in the same state of mind?
  • EK : After When father was away on business, I would have been almost depressed if Time of the gipsies, which won the Best Director prize, had not received anything. As I never made films so that they become big success, Cannes is the standard for measuring my work. From one film to another also, the historical and political context changed. At the time, Communism still formed a system on a planetary scale, and my first film was perceived as very political. Ten years after, in 1995, Communism had broken down and I made Underground. I approached in it, from the point of view of somebody who comes out of it, without ideology, the question of the destruction of my country. And in Cannes, I am the victim of the plot! An alliance between the Bosnian intellectuals, the French press and some French who take Bosnia for an intellectual safari! Fortunately, the jury was not influenced, and I received the Palm.
  
  
• In When father was away on business, your political matter was correct. With Underground, you become incorrect.
  • EK : These concepts of politically correct and incorrect frighten me a lot. Is the new pope politically correct? It seems to me that yes. But if he is, I don’t see why, me, I would be incorrect. Maybe, in fact, what is politically incorrect is what is opposed to the interests of multinational companies... Between When father was away in Business (1985) and Underground (1995), I experimented a lot. I improved my style. This is what counts.
  
  
• You were attacked for your standpoint, not only for your films.
  • EK : When you express yourself publicly on politics, you are likely to be attacked. And nobody grants you the right to change opinion. Anyway, you can’t attack a film just because you disagree with the political positions of his author. Here is my declaration: my position on the war in Yugoslavia was very close to the one two eminent people, as opposite as possible politically: Noam Chomski and Henry Kissinger. I never became nationalist. I was against the destruction of my country; this was my only political position. I thought that while becoming small we were going to lose any form of power and identity. This was my political culpability.
  
  
• How do you live the fact of being attacked publicly by your friends of youth?
  • EK : During the destruction process of my country I also found my roots. I discovered that a part of my family was of Serb origin. I don’t have a problem with that. But my former friends do. They needed that I become the propaganda tool for the new country.
  
  
• Did your pro-Serb positions slow down your career?
  • EK : No. I survived because I had my own aesthetics. I was lucky too. I was always in the magnetic field of people who found my cinema special and exciting and I was never asked that each dollar shows a profit. Probably because of all the Golden Palms, Golden Lion, Bear, etc.
  
  
• Do you think there is a form of elitism in your films ?
  • EK : Yes, because, today, it’s a luxury to integrate aesthetics into the cinema: the cinema is manufactured to serve the aims of the market; it doesn’t respect time nor space. The problem, when, like me, you come from a small country on the cultural map, is that you can make one film or two. But then, it becomes too much. It’s twenty-two years that I make some, and I think that my style has affected the cinema. It became a pattern, quoted in example, retaken by others.

Interview by Jean-Luc Douin and Isabelle Regnier, translated by Matthieu Dhennin

The (Mis)Directions of Emir Kusturica
By DAN HALPERN

Last year at the Cannes Film Festival, the Sarajevo-born director Emir Kusturica was taking questions from the press about his new movie. He was discussing the sorts of things he likes to discuss: why the cinema he loves is being ruined by an inhuman, mass-produced fast food coming out of Hollywood, for instance. Until, inevitably, he was visited with a mild version of the question reporters have never failed to ask him over the last decade: During the wars that destroyed Yugoslavia in the 1990's, why didn't he come out publicly against Slobodan Milošević, the Serbian leader who was ravaging his homeland?
Kusturica, who spent most of his life in Bosnia but now lives in Serbia, is one of the most celebrated filmmakers in Europe, as festooned with various film-festival golden palms and golden lions and silver bears as anyone working in cinema today. His films ''When Father Was Away on Business'' and ''Underground'' each won the top prize at Cannes in 1985 and 1995, respectively, and this week he returns to Cannes to serve as president of the most prestigious festival jury in the world. But over the last 10 years, the man whom his fans see as the heir to Fellini's impassioned exuberance has been asked about his politics almost as much as his movies. And at times, he loses his patience for it. So, in Cannes: why didn't he speak up against Milošević?
''Nobody's perfect,'' he said.

When he's not being questioned by reporters or touring as a guitarist in his popular Balkan gypsy-punk-rock band, Kusturica (pronounced KOOS-toor-eet-sa) now spends most of his time in a small village in western Serbia he has recently had constructed from scratch. He's a big man, standing 6-foot-3, with a powerful chest and a potent set of shoulders, and there is an amiable menace to the way he moves; he has a reputation as a brawler and a firebrand, but, relaxing in his village, where I visited him recently, he comes off more like a gentle papa or, sometimes, a beneficent feudal lord.
While Kusturica may be little known in America, he has achieved a peculiarly European renown. In Madrid, where his band, the No Smoking Orchestra, played to a sold-out crowd in January, his film ''Black Cat, White Cat'' remains wildly popular seven years after its release. His most recent movie, ''Life Is a Miracle,'' in which a Serbian engineer falls in love with his Bosnian Muslim hostage, shared France's prestigious Cesar award for best European film, in February. And yet he remains enormously controversial. To his critics, Kusturica is an apologist and propagandist for the murderous forces that devastated his country.
Born in 1954, Kusturica grew up an only child in a secular Muslim family in Sarajevo, the capital of the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. At 18 he was packed off to Prague to study at the Czech state film school, FAMU, in part thanks to the older Kusturicas' anxiety over the young Emir's enthusiastic interest in minor acts of youthful criminality. It didn't take him long to be noticed. By the time he was 40, he had already won most of the major prizes the film world has to offer.
The international success of his first films, set in Sarajevo, was unheard of for a Yugoslav director, and Kusturica was essentially crowned a prince of the city, its great cultural savior and all-around celebrity; but the war that dismembered the nation ended his love affair with his birthplace. In 1992, Serbian paramilitiaries, with the support of the Yugoslav army, began a campaign of terror against Bosnia's Muslims and Croats as the leaders of the Bosnian republic began to follow other republics in seceding from Yugoslavia. When the fighting began, Kusturica was living in Paris. ''I couldn't believe it,'' he says. ''I was one of those people who wouldn't believe this would happen, that this could be happening. I didn't want to believe.''
He wasn't ultimately given any choice, of course. Even before the war began, Kusturica got himself involved in various political and physical altercations -- with Bosnians who thought he wasn't Bosnian enough, with Serbian nationalists who thought he was too Bosnian -- and his battles continued throughout the war. (Most famously, Kusturica challenged Vojislav Šešelj, a radical ultranationalist Serbian politician and paramilitary leader, to a duel in Belgrade; Šešelj refused, saying he wouldn't be responsible for the death of a naive artist.) At the outset of the siege of Sarajevo, Kusturica wrote an impassioned plea in Le Monde for his battered city. Not long after that, Bosnian Muslim irregulars looted the Sarajevo apartment belonging to his parents, who had moved to Montenegro; even his film prizes were taken. A few months later, his father died of a heart attack. ''This war killed him too,'' Kusturica said at the time. And this, perhaps above all, is something he is not willing to forgive Sarajevo for.
''My father was always saying we were Serbs,'' he says, ''but I didn't pay much attention.'' Kusturica finally went to a library and says he confirmed that the Kusturicas had been Orthodox Christian Serbs until, a few centuries ago, a branch of the family converted to Islam when the region was under Ottoman domination. It's a common ancestral story among Bosnia's Muslim Slavs, few of whom consider themselves Serbs because of it. For his part, Kusturica refused to see himself as either a Bosnian Muslim or Serb. Instead, like a good number of Sarajevens, he affirmed his loyalty to the Yugoslav experiment, a complex cultural brew of Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Jews, gypsies -- a mix of religions and ethnicities and historical nationalities that together formed a single nation.
By the time of the Balkan wars, many of Kusturica's countrymen had come to regard ''Yugoslavia'' as a code word for Serbian domination. But Kusturica continued to insist that he was simply a Yugoslav. His wife, Maja, is the child of a Bosnian Serb and a Slovene-Croat, making their children, Stribor, 26, and Dunja, 18, Slovene-Croat-Bosnian-Muslim Serbs. Which is to say that Kusturica's family represents a version of what was once called Yugoslavia.
Indeed, the subtitle of ''Underground,'' his most celebrated and controversial film, is ''Once Upon a Time There Was a Country.'' Completed during the siege of Sarajevo, the movie is a satirical tour de force about the web of lies men made for one another in communist Yugoslavia. Like a hilarious, heartbreaking dream, it follows two seemingly invincible best friends, Marko and Blacky, happy hooligans in love with the same woman, who join the Yugoslav partisan resistance against the Nazis in Belgrade. After a scheme goes wrong, Marko, a slick opportunist, wins the object of their affection by fooling Blacky, a bullish roughneck, into thinking the war is still going on and hiding him and a host of other dupes in a basement -- the conceit of the movie is that he pulls this off for decades -- until they finally emerge only to see their country break apart.

Emir likes to make a mess,'' says Nele Karajlić, the frontman and vocalist for No Smoking since the band's founding in the early 80's (Kusturica joined in 1986; it is now officially called Emir Kusturica and the No Smoking Orchestra). ''I think his idea is, when he makes a movie, whatever he's going to do, if it's got a wedding, a funeral, some party, anything -- he always wants to make a lot of noise, both in sound and in color.'' As we drove to dinner in Belgrade this past December, the noise Kusturica was making mostly took the form of a great and serious indignation with the corporatization of the world. From the passenger seat, he was growing increasingly enraged by the billboards in the city. The Serbian capital is only slowly recovering from the effects of war, international sanctions and the NATO bombing it suffered in 1999, but superficially it's well into a headlong rush toward consumer commercialism. ''Here, like in Moscow, even in Petersburg, everywhere,'' he said, gesturing angrily at the advertisements lining the street. ''Everywhere starts to look the same, everything must look the same, everything that was different, it must be covered up by this sameness.'' He was fully caught up in a momentum of sincere outrage when his wife, Maja, a dark-haired beauty with a particularly graceful knack for letting the air out of the international superstar sitting next to her, gently stopped him short.
EMIR: Everything must be sold! Everything must be for sale! Everyone must buy! Everyone must have a Jeep!
MAJA: Even you.
EMIR: Yes, even me.
MAJA: You have three.
There aren't too many other people in the world who, over three decades of his career, have managed to stop Kusturica from making the noise he wants to. And he has always tended to concern himself with things he was supposed to be quiet about: ethnic violence, incest, Communism. His central characters have often been on the margins: gypsies and Jews and Muslims, the poor and the disenfranchised, the crippled and the simple; accidental dissidents, musical thieves, amoral outlaws, mystified children.
This sounds depressing, but these are not movies that will corroborate the fear of the unconverted, that all European art films are plodding and pretentious. Kusturica's impulsive self has served him better in his art than in his politics: his recognizable stamp is one of frenzied, raucous energy. No matter how brutal his subject, the movies are stuffed with joy, animated by screwball antics. Above all, there is always a riot of music. When there's a scene in a Kusturica movie without a brass band somehow involved, one is probably not far behind. Meanwhile, animals tromp around everywhere, inserting themselves in the action with great persistence: magical turkeys, levitating fish, thieving elephants, marauding bears, phalanxes of geese. A tender dialogue between lovers is likely to include a dog insistently tearing up a pillow just behind them. You could watch a scene of two men talking to each other in the middle of a war zone five times before noticing that during the conversation one of the men is casually shining his shoes with a wildly protesting cat.
His one American-made film, ''Arizona Dream'' (1993), was a financial failure, though one that attracted a certain cult following. (Starring Johnny Depp, Jerry Lewis and Faye Dunaway, it includes an extraordinary scene with Depp and Lewis dressed up as Eskimos speaking a mock-Inuit language with subtitles.) Today, Kusturica admits to no particular intention to break into the American mainstream market. It's not that he hasn't had his chances. After the success of ''Black Cat, White Cat,'' American producers and actors came knocking again, but the projects -- a Sean Penn-produced version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel ''The Autumn of the Patriarch,'' to star Marlon Brando, a ''Crime and Punishment'' in Brighton Beach with Johnny Depp as a Raskolnikov who plays bass in a punk band, an adaptation of the D. M. Thomas novel ''The White Hotel,'' for which Nicole Kidman was eager to have the lead role -- never went anywhere beyond the planning stage, despite how much the Hollywood heavyweights wanted to work with him.
Kusturica has never gotten along particularly well with the men with the money in Los Angeles and New York, and his new film, ''Life Is a Miracle,'' has no release planned in the United States. He tends to shoot over absurdly long periods, rewriting and reimagining the movie up to the last minute. He tends to discourage producers from imagining that they might have anything at all to do with the work of art. And he tends to tell powerful people what he thinks of them. What he has thought hasn't always been particularly friendly.
''What you have now is a Hollywood that is pure poison,'' Kusturica says. ''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. Why don't I see a Frank Capra today? Because people aren't like this anymore? People haven't changed that much in 60 years.''

Kusturica shot ''Life Is a Miracle,'' which is a little like his own Capra film, in western Serbia, and when he was through making the movie, he decided to make a village out of nothing in just about the same spot. He has said that he decided to build the hilltop retreat (including a small restaurant, guest house, cafe, art gallery, underground cinema and Orthodox church as well as 25 abandoned houses he bought and transported to the site) because he lost his city in the war and so wanted to build his own; he has also said that the village itself is the best film he has ever made.
In December, looking out on the place he created -- a set of simple wooden constructions along a single main drag covered in snow -- he said: ''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.'' (He was partly joking, but only partly.) A few days later, he added: ''I want to preserve something, and also to build something new -- to build something for people, not for a nation, with no borders and no prejudice. Something against this idiocracy, against the mass product, which is the sign and symbol of all the world today.''
As you look down on the Serbian countryside from the small peak the village is built on, however, it's hard not to think of borders. Kusturica's town lies only a few miles from the frontier of the Bosnian Serb portion of Bosnia, and not very far from Sarajevo. But although he may be happy here, a short distance from his birthplace, he won't be taking any trains back home. He has not been in Sarajevo since 1992, and he says he will never go back.
''Underground'' was defined by a dark basement, but most of ''Life Is a Miracle'' takes place in soft, comforting outdoor light, with great attention to the landscape; it's a resolutely above-ground movie. Luka, a Serbian engineer who is building a rail line connecting Bosnia and Serbia, refuses to believe that war is coming. After his son Miloš is drafted into the army by the Serbian side and then captured by the Bosnian military, Luka is offered Sabaha, a Bosnian Muslim, as a hostage to exchange for Miloš. But Luka and Sabaha begin to cling to each other as the war escalates, baffled by the hatred around them, and they fall in love. As the movie proceeds, its heroisms and villainies are spread out over the nations: there are Serbian characters who are murderous, greedy criminals, but also Serbs who are honorable, virtuous strivers; Bosnian Muslim characters are both innocent victims and casual killers. Intermixing the tendentious and the generous, it's both a macabre and a hopeful piece of art, classic melodrama and lunatic comedy at once.
The movie, however, doesn't seem to have changed anyone's mind. ''Life Is a Miracle'' wasn't much noticed in any of the former Yugoslav republics other than Serbia. In the rest of Europe, the film's reception was warm, with some seeing a move toward reconciliation; the French edition of Premiere magazine called it ''probably the softest and most optimistic'' of Kusturica's movies. But it has hardly swayed anyone who felt strongly about ''Underground.'' Kusturica's fans and enemies have already chosen sides. To his critics, Kusturica's failure to single out Serbian leaders for blame demonstrates an inexcusable moral blindness. To his admirers, it speaks to his humane refusal to see people as anything other than individuals.
For his part, Kusturica says he is undaunted by his critics and has no interest in being instructed on how to make art. ''My purpose is to make a movie to make you warm,'' he says. ''To give you some heat. Now, this rational world has become a place where only what is cool is good.'' He adds, ''Do you cut the movie on the basis of the beat of modernity or the basis of the beat of your own heart?''
According to Nele Karajlić, who has become one of Kusturica's closest artistic partners over 20 years, ''What Emir always does is put the human being in the center. That's what he cares about. Politics, nationality, war -- these are mise en scene, that's all. I remember he called me on the phone and told me the story of the guy in 'Life Is a Miracle' -- you know, it's a true story, it really happened, this man and woman together -- and we made it into a song. And I tell you, for us, this song, this movie, it felt like a window in this windowless room we had been stuck in, this bloody Balkan room without any exit, and we recognized a way out. We recognized we can continue to live.''

Dan Halpern has written for The New Republic, Travel & Leisure and other publications. This is his first article for the magazine.

[Note : This interview was found on a blog on internet. I can't guaranty its origin nor its authenticity, but the answers are quite funny...]