Emir Kusturica looks like a big little boy, bad guy-good heart, rough and charming, always like going away. He was born in Sarajevo, thirty-three years ago. He was a rock'n'roll star in his country. His films show always children growing, curiously seducing and emblematic Animals, worlds disappearing, and splendid attempts to take off at the same time of the ground and reality. Long and difficult to make, Arizona Dream is his first American film.
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EK : It's a question of vocabulary, of expression. It was necessary that the first glance was the one of a local. So that I can say that the American dream doesn't exist anymore, I needed to know what it had been, in this country where the old cars have become statues symbolizing its ideal “To escape from its culpability”.
In Arizona Dream, Faye Dunaway always try to fly. Do you feel, yourself, that you've touched the ground ?
EK :
I don't think so. My idea of the cinema is basically to make everything fly away. I feel myself very close to Tarkovski from this point of view, and the very strong feeling he had of the natural elements. I try to keep these old references. Regarding the Flight, it's obvious that David Atkins, the guy who brought the script to me, wanted to make of Faye Dunaway an infantile character, and proposed to surround her of puppets and toys. This appeared to me rather as a psychological idea, not a cinematographic one. My first impression when I arrived to Arizona was : “My God, if I lived here, I would fly away”, you feel the need to plane over these vastnesses, over this desert.
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EK :
No, no regret regarding the film. But the memory of the terrible regret that I felt each day while shooting, to be there, in America, not to return home, in Sarajevo. This feeling to be separated into two. Each day I said to myself, I will leave, and each day, no, I stay. I tried so many times before to help my country, and here we are. I would like to say something, please, it's important. I was among those, not numerous in Yugoslavia, in ex-Yugoslavia, who fought to avoid this catastrophe. I can identify with each tear which is dropped over there, with each child who stayed there, with each suffering. But I can't identify with any party which tears apart there, with any of the political designs which try to impose. Each one goes on his side, each one rewrites his own history, with his own heroes. In my heart and in my soul, I believe that no independent or dependent republic deserves that only one child, only one woman, only one man is killed. And, according to me, I must tell you, no matter what happens, I'll never be able to identify with any of the future winners of this horrible war.
Interview by Heymann Danielle & Frodon Jean-Michel, translation by Matthieu Dhennin
en/itv_93-01-06_le_monde.txt · Last modified: 2008/02/17 18:39 by matthieu1