Emir Kusturica's noisy, eye-popping Gypsy comedy Black Cat, White Cat is his most life-affirming film yet
As infectious as a movie gets, Emir Kusturica's gorgeously ramshackle Black Cat, White Cat is not only the comic follow-up to the Sarajevo-born, forty-four-year-old director's magical realist masterpiece Time of the Gypsies (1989) but a super-energized apolitical dposte to those who vilified his 1995 Palme d'Or-winner Underground as being pro-Serb propaganda. Filmed on the Danube by Kusturica in 1997 after he reversed his decision to retire following the Underground furor, this latest Fellini-esque paean to his beloved Gypsies is a saga of two rival dynasties, an arranged marriage, and burgeoning young love. It features a train hijacking, a pig munching on an abandoned car, a coke-snorting gangster with a taste for zany Balkan techno, a singer who pulls nails from wood with her ass, a wedding sequence that tops The Deer Hunters, an omnipresent flock of geese, and some of the most fluid and Inventive filmmaking you'll ever see; it opens this month. I caught up with its largerthan-life maker in Italy, where he was touring with his drummer son's agit-rock band No Smoking.

• GRAHAM FULLER: NOW that Black Cat, White Cat Is beIng released after the Kosovo war Instead of during it, it has a kind of after-the-fact tailsmanic optimism about it. Does that sit well with you?
  • EMIR KUSTURICA: Yeah. Even in Underground, which is a much more historical, political film, you get an idea of what I wanted to underline in Black Cat, White Cat - basically the hedonistic nature of the people living in Yugoslavia. With Black Cat, White Cat, I wanted to make another film about the character of the people I spent most of my time with when I was a child. I was raised in a middle-class family close to the place where the Gypsies lived [in Sarajevo], and I was always enthusiastic about their freedom, the way they accepted life, their direct connection to joy, and their strength and optimism. Gypsies have a very bad position in society because every middle-class mother-fucker likes to have somebody beneath him. If you go to the district in Skopje in Macedonia where the Gypsies live, you'll find a lot of people who hate them and who want nothing more than to be one step above them. I think this one-step-above mentality is a big part of the racism you see all over Europe. Any time in the history of Europe when Gypsies have been targeted, it has indicated that we are entering a new era in which totalitarian feelings are rising.
• Do you see Gypsy culture as a kind of utopianism compared with other Balkan sensibilities?
  • Yeah, and the world needs utopias, because without them we are going to run out of power and die very soon. Gypsies have never caused people of other nations to suffer, and it's nonsense to suggest that they collaborated with the Serbs. Since they came to Europe over six centuries ago, they've survived without using the instruments of war that almost every European nation used. There are still around seven million Gypsies around the world, which is quite a big number given what happened to them [during the Holocaust]. But they are a people who believe in beauty and reproducing themselves and who play fantastic music, and they have proved there are many possible ways of living and of organizing yourself. I'm not idealizing the existence of those Gypsies who live in incredibly bad conditions in Rome and Turin, but I know happy Gypsies, too.
• Are you also drawn to Gypsies now because they are stateless, as in a sense you are yourself?
  • I feel this very closely. The other day I gave an interview to Portuguese television in a car and I discovered I'm most lucid when the landscape's moving. I'm a man without a country, traveling between Paris and New York and Belgrade and Montenegro. My roots are in Herzegovina, but I don't care about nationality. I care about higher values in human life.
• Can you talk about Fellini's influence on your filmmaking?
  • Something I'm proud of is discovering the way this guy made his movies and that I can make mine in the same way. I'm using these little tricks, like a magician who sees one circus and goes into another to work. Hopefully, in my films you get excited by every character you meet, as you do in Fellini's. There's also that incredible architecture he created in his scenes and his kind of Mediterranean, paganistic vision of life. Those are the major influences.
• In Underground, you had a blaring brass band charging after the heroes, like a kind of crazy Greek chorus. In Black Cat, White Cat, it's a flock of geese. Why geese?
  • In Gypsy mythology, geese are the animals who flew the Gypsies over the ocean and into Europe, which I think is beautiful. Geese are so elegant and somehow so intelligent that between one and many geese there is incredible harmony, plus they bring a great dynamic to a scene. It's also like a color you need to bring to a painting from time to time - my movies are not just based on the commercial need to tell a story. I like repeating those kinds of colors or motifs because they please me.
• The end of Black Cat, White Cat echoes the coda to Underground when the main characters - who die and are then resurrected - float off on a river bank that breaks from the mainland, in Underground was that a kind of wishful separation of a united Yugoslavia from the rest of Europe?
  • It's not a strict parallel - I just have a primal feeling about broken nations. Broken art, broken land - the thought of all that created much more than I was initially thinking. The place where we shot the island in Underground is one mile from where we filmed Black Cat, White Cat and one of the most beautiful and inspiring places on the Danube. There's a tragic fallout in Underground, but with Black Cat, White Cat, I came back to what could be a natural source of regenerating a certain power that the nation has, even though the film's about Gypsies.
• There's a lot of confusion about where you stand politically. Do you want to clarify it?
  • Listen, I don't have any problem with my position. When Yugoslavia was being destroyed, I accused both our nationalistic leaders and other European leaders. But if you didn't scream slogans against [Serbian president Slobodan] Milošević when he first appeared, it was enough to tar you as pro-Milošević. The moment you don't instantly separate what's perceived to be good or evil - which is not something I accept as possible - you are aligned with one or the other. But you don't want to justify your position because if you do it just begins an endless process. So a lot of different stories have been created about me. Ever since I was very young, I've been contrary to the mainstream, contrary to everything. But I've never, as it's been alleged in some parts of Europe, been against humanity. I've always wanted to see my country, the events that unfold, and the whole planet in their full complexity, not from the ideological perspective our people were fed during the Communist era, which, I must be honest, introduced the tragedy to my country.
• What are your thoughts about addressing Yugoslavia's tragedy head-on in a movie again?
  • After Underground, I felt like a victim of the European media's anathema because I was accused of being the very thing I was fighting against in my movie. But I'm thinking about making a new movie that starts with the bombing of Sarajevo and ends with the NATO bombing of Serbia. It's the idea that the beginning of one war leads to the beginning of another. As in Underground, I will place it all in the same frame, although for an artist to be politically clear - that's very difficult. For example, I'm very much behind [Milo] Djukanovic [Montenegro's independent-minded president, an opponent of Milošević], but that does not mean I blindly accept everything he says. Personally, I just want to keep my eyes open, to keep my vision, which I would say is quite strong, and to be mentally healthy.
• Have you completed your recent acting gig [In Patrice Leconte's film La Veuve de Saint-Pierre]?
  • Yes. And I will probably be shocked when I see my talking head on the big screen. [laughs]

He duels, he brawls, he helps cows to give birth. And in between he makes films. Serbian director Emir Kustirica talks to Fiachra Gibbons about politics, his art - and the war. When he's not brawling on the streets of Belgrade with men who make Arkan look like Mary Poppins, challenging people to duels, or playing in Serbian rock bands, Emir Kusturica is winning the Palme D'Or at Cannes. No other director has ever won it twice, not even Fellini. Kusturica idolises, maybe even fancies himself as a Fellini. But the pudgy little Italian would never have had the balls to be Emir Kusturica.
Few would. It is no exaggeration to say that a lot of people would like to see the maker of Underground and The Time Of The Gypsies dead. He is, in fact, lucky to be alive. In 1993 he challenged Vojislav Šešelj, the leader of the ultra-nationalist Radical party, now part of Milošević's government, to a duel. He said it should be in the heart of Belgrade, at high noon, with the weapon of his choosing. Šešelj refused, saying he "he didn't want to be accused of the murder of an artist". Two years later he punched Nebojsa Pajkić, leader of the equally bloodcurdling New Serbian Right movement, to the ground. Pajkić's wife battered Kusturica with her handbag, a gift from her "dear friend" Radovan Karadžić, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs who is now wanted for war crimes. The feuds do not end with his political opponents. Many have been with former friends. "Kusturica is the greatest traitor to Bosnia," one told me. Another said he was a "war criminal, a Chetnik arselicker, a puppet of Milošević... It makes me puke to think of him." The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Livy even made a film to attack him. "You will not find anyone in Sarajevo with a good word for him," he said. I did. Several actually. All spoke of his courage, his integrity and his temper. "He is no one's puppet, least of all Milošević's," said a former colleague from Sarajevo TV. "People who say that are blind with hatred. He has always gone his own way. He has a powerful sense of humour. You know, it is so sharp it frightens, that's why he makes enemies."
The survivors of his exhausting shoots are equally divided. "Emir kills himself for his films. And if you work for him he will kill you too." He has had at least one breakdown; more a burn-out actually, during the making of his brilliant but shambolic American debut, Arizona Dreams. Kusturica is a man perpetually on the point of combustion.
We met the day Nato bombed the convoys of Kosovan refugees and blamed it on the Serbs. I toyed for a moment with the idea of not mentioning the war when he barrelled in, a great bearded bear with a half-chewed cigar sticking out of his mouth like a Balkan Castro. You can see him carrying a Kalashnikov as easily as a camera until you look into his eyes. They are the largest, softest, brown eyes I've ever seen on a man. There is something sad and very vulnerable in them. If I were a woman, I'd have gone weak at the knees. So tell me, how does it feel to belong to the most hated nation on earth - after the English, of course. A plate smashed on to the floor behind us. He didn't laugh. Instead his head dropped into his hands. "Terrible, terrible, terrible! I think this might be the end of the world, you know. Tell me, why bomb bridges?" "Listen, my heart cannot resist these Albanian refugees, the pictures of fathers, mothers and crying kids, but I also had my heart broken watching Serbian refugees leaving Croatia. Nearly half a million of them were kicked out of Knin and Krajina, with American backing, in one weekend. And do you know what Le Monde called it? 'Self-motivated ethnic cleansing'. There is a human level here that is being ignored."
"It is incredible. Nato didn't help the Albanians and they have only strengthened Milošević. This Robin Fook. Who is this Robin Gook?... 'We don't want your Serb crocodile tears about the attack on the convoys,' he was saying on the news today. The English nation are a gentle nation, whom I greatly admire, but this man is a small, hairy muppet. How can you let him represent you?" I tell him that despite his gnomic looks, Cook is considered a Casanova. "You mean women want to have sex with him? How could they take him into their beds? What kind of women have you in England? I would rather go with a goat." And he laughs his great soft laugh. "I'm sorry, I do not mean to be disrespectful," and he waves his hand like an apologetic pasha.
Kusturica is a former Sarajevan rocker and TV satirist, of mixed Serb and Muslim blood, who clings to forlorn hope of a multi-ethnic Yugoslavia. Kusturica is embarrassed by his reputation, but unapologetic. "I am very impulsive and very stupid sometimes, but I am very clean." He's not just passionate - there is a generosity of thought and spirit about him. "My son [a pop star, who played at the concerts in Belgrade to defy the bombing] is now a big Serb because of Nato, but there is not the blood of one nation of Yugoslavia that does not flow through him. The stupid thing is that Serbia is the only one which is multi-ethnic. Most of the rest are ethnically-cleansed mini-states. Not a single Serb survives in Croatia. And now the cowboys are killing us. Nearly 40%, you know, are not Serbs - Croats, Hungarians, Muslims, Greeks." I say there are a lot less Albanians now. "That is Milošević. Serbia is not Milošević, although Nato are now turning him into a saint. The west have made him into this Orwellian character and they try to play Orwellian games with him. But Milošević can only play at being a Slav, or a peasant. They are turning him into Tito who stood up to Stalin in 1948. And, of course, we have this problem in us that we like resisting. The Serbs are not a nation of murderers. They have contributed so much to western culture; Nobel prizes, five world champion basketball teams, and what about the physicist Nikola Tesla? His work on the ionosphere made it possible for Cruise missiles now to drop on Belgrade."
"You know, I have a friend, Milo Djukanovic [the president of Montenegro], who we democrats have great hopes of against Milošević, but the bombs have minimised him. But you know the cowboys, they must win. I was reading an article by an American Democratic senator who said the war was a big mistake, it should never have happened - but we must win! "I live in Normandy, and the next day I was helping a cow give birth. She couldn't do it herself. I had to pull it out. I wondered what kind of worl d is it that a cow has to be helped to do the most natural thing. Are we like that cow that we cannot think for ourselves any more? All we are are good receptors to the new religion of Hollywood and CNN. I am very scared. And I don't know if I can stay here and pay taxes for bombs to be dropped on my son."
We are in the darkened corner of an empty room at the back of Paris's oldest Jewish restaurant. Portraits of long-dead rabbis and their beards stare out of the gloom, reproaching us. I wonder for a while if he is trying to draw down the mantle of the Holocaust on his own people. But does Kusturica have a people any more? "You don't know what the war did to a mixed family like mine. 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 absurb new entities... And, of course, I could not speak Bosnian," he drawls. Bosnian, like Croat, is an artificial creation, presently being "purified" of anything that smacks of the old Serbo-Croat. The mortar attack on the marketplace in Sarajevo was the turning point for him. Kusturica claims it was self-inflicted to bring the west into the war. "I rang one of my friends and he said, 'I don't know who is worse, the Serbs shelling us from the mountains, or the Muslims defending us.' It was like we were tearing out our limbs as well as our brains."
Which is why his "betrayal" is so bitterly felt in his home town and why he will always be seen by some as a lackey of Belgrade. "I am not trying to say I'm a genius, but Underground was the strongest attack there has been on Milošević. It is about a man who locks his friends in a cellar for 40 years and convinces them that the war is still going on. He uses them, but they still think he is a great guy. And this was shown in every cinema in Serbia." It is to the gypsies he now feels his greatest attachment. "They are the most despised and the free-est people of all. They are hated equally by everybody, yet they have no prejudices themselves. They call their kids after communists and after John F Kennedy. They are medieval but they have mobile phones. I love them, they hold my heart." Gypsies feature in several of his films, including the latest, a rip-roaring comedy called Black Cat, White Cat. Again, he has been attacked for making a comedy while Milošević was still in power.
I loved it. So did Guardian critic Jonathan Romney. "Every time it slacks for a second someone throws in a goat and several geese," Romney said. Or someone tries unsuccessfuly to hang themselves - a motif of his work. Why? "I had a teacher in Prague who told me you tell a good movie from a bad one by the fact that in good ones every character look s like they are running out of gravity. I thought, why don't I really make people levitate, like Chagall?" he says, pointing to the nodding rabbis. "That is why maybe I'm a troublemaker making movies, because each shot has to be for me an original. It murders me."
In the flesh, he is like one of his wild heroes, only more so - part god, part peasant, part philosopher. Throw in the psychopath and he'd be the perfect well-rounded Slav, as he might say. And it is the Slav mind that really worries him. The Russian one in particular. "I am shit scared where this will all end. As Bismark says, Italy always betrays and Russia always comes late. Russia to me is now like a beggar. In one hand it has nuclear weapons, in the other a begging bowl. If it all blows, it will be from an irrational thing." When I bring up his most recent feud, with the Serb director Goran Paskaljević, thunder breaks over his face and he looks like all of the great Slav bogeymen rolled into one, from Rasputin to Ivan the Terrible. It is only then that I notice the scar twitch under his right eye. Paskaljević claims Kusturica tried to stop his film Powderkeg, about a day in the life of Belgrade, from being shown at the Venice Film Festival. Kusturica admits to a bit of gamesmanship but says this was "only after he started attacking me at every turn, accusing me of being a mouthpiece of Milošević just to get attention for himself. I did not try to stop his film. I simply told the producer we shared that he would have to choose between me and that jerk in future. "You know, the world is full of assholes. Paskaljević is one. Here in France we have Bernard-Henri Levy. He is a vulture. He is now somewhere safe near Kosovo being a 'witness'. I think he was dying to be a witness at Clinton's meeting with Lewinsky in the Oval Office." The girl from Renault wants him to wind up. He's making an advert. "I have to live. My films don't make a lot of money and since the war I have a lot of people to support." He doesn't want to go. Two thoughts have been bothering him. "You know, with the billions they have spent on the war so far they could have taken every Albanian and Serb in Kosovo to the Bahamas, and they could have listened to some reggae, sang, drank, f**** and be happy. Our industry and economy could have been rebuilt and everyone would have kissed each other."
Then his head drops into his hands again. "Kosovo is where the Battle Of the Field Of The Blackbirds happened. The Serbs sacrificed themselves to save Europe from the Turks. It was inconclusive, and many lives were lost on both sides. I fear this will happen again." He gets up and gives out a sigh: "I am never going to make another interview. And I feel with the war I should not make another film." I tell him he has threatened that before but still came back for more. I tell him I can't wait to see his new film - which he has yet to start - DM Thomas's sprawling White Hotel, from Dennis Potter's script. "But I'm serious this time," he says, looking genuinely hurt. "Remember the next time you go to war," he says finally, stretching out his shovel of a hand to me, "please get a better looking foreign minister." And he sticks his stogie back in his mouth and smiles the cheesiest grin. "And the next time you want someone to write against me in the Guardian, let me do it. I am my best enemy."

Born in Sarajevo, Bosnian director Emir Kusturica won, in 1995, in Cannes, his second Palme d'or for Underground - an inventive, colorful and controversial evocation of the yugoslavian war. To his eyes, western civilization is on the wrong way.

• What do the attacks on Yugoslavia and the martyrdom of the Kosovars inspire to you ?
  • My mother lives in Montenegro. My son, in Belgrade. Every evening, he goes in the shelters for the night. I consider these bombardments completely irrational, unjustifiable. They won't bring anything to anybody. And especially not to the Albanian civilians. By the way, what do the columns of refugees flee ? Exactions or NATO bombings ? The use of the force does not solve anything. Not more that of NATO than that of Milošević. If he is the dictator we denounce, if his misdeeds are proven, it is ridiculous to act like him. A bombardment never solved any problem.
• Do the raids help the regime ?
  • Obviously, yes. The action of the allied reinforces the political base of Milošević, including among his most determined opponents. My friends in Belgrade told me that in case of election tomorrow he would have get 100% ! I would never be his lawyer, on the contrary. But you have to face it : the attitude of the West is terribly non-productive. What happens in such a context with those who, face to Belgrade, fight for the democratic change ? See the president of Montenegro, Milo Djukanovic, a close friend whom I support in combat. What will happen to him ? What does his political project become ?
• Is there a pacific solution ?
  • I don't know. The problem is old. It won't be solved tomorrow. But the solution undoubtedly needs a conference of the Balkan States, under international supervision.
• Does this crisis cause a gap between Serbian opinion and the West ?
  • The divorce is already signed. I was very astonished by the size of the anti-NATO demonstrations last weekend. That simply means that people, inside and outside Yugoslavia, want peace before all.