Emir Kusturica is a secret and almost imperceptible man. Somehow like Stanley Kubrick, his works require and defy analysis at the same time. Emir does not speak : he is like his arrowtooth, he “knows”! In most of his interviews, he limits his answers only to evasive or practical sentences. To go further, one should watch for it (”Anne, Anne my sister, don't see you anything coming ?”) ; he is so nice and disarming that it becomes difficult to give him the pressure required for this kind of exercise. If somebody tries to enter his own intimacy, he closes at once… These remarks, collected between February 25 and March 6 (1993) in Normandy, are hybrid, without obvious coherence. Kusturica passes from pragmatism to hermetism with the most total ease and there is certainly enough to discourage more than one. We chose to deliver them to you at the rough state and to let to you read between the lines, to try to preserve their energy and their emotion. Anyway, Kusturica will undoubtedly remain a long time unexplored, such as virgin forest, so dense that years of investigation would not be enough to clear it. The secrecy of Emir, well kept, is in his films.

• It was said that Time of the Gypsies was a kind of homage to Jean Vigo's “L'Atalante”. Can you explain it ?
  • Emir Kusturica : It's a logical part of film : its essence. It's much more than an homage ! Each time I see a piece of “L'Atalante”, I remain persuaded that it is undoubtedly the best film ever made. I don't know exactly if it's due to its pure qualities or the lapse of time during which the film was finally concluded, or both. The dialogued parts however are not very developed, the sound is limited in quality but its meeting with the image is made under the best possible conditions, despite everything. It is one of first sounded films, you know ! It contains so many different plans, so many smart framings, the whole at the service of simple emotions. Today, it would be practically impossible to make it. An allegory would have to be tried… This film undoubtedly contains the necessary energy to understand the human being. It's really my favourite film and I pay it a tribute every day of my life.

• Are the dreams of love never achieved ? or perhaps thanks to the cinema ?
  • EK : I learned something when I was a student. Love, death, birth : all these elements must appear in a film. Thus, when I learned cinema, I always intended to say that the history of films developed similarly with that of architectures ; these houses and these sky-scrapers built by the men. It is the same, they are “selected pieces” among most important moments of life. Incorporating love is the most beautiful of existence. I do not know if love becomes reality or not, but I feel that it must absolutely be part of the drama to be understood.

• Thus, the symbol of the amateur camera in your four films ?
  • EK : I want to measure the reality and today's cinema, especially that of Hollywood, which does not make any difference between reality and naturalism any more. Reality is something “selected” in everyday life, then is integrated in another context. There is not only the amateur camera in my films, but also of the people who go to the cinema. How to measure the degree of reality, permanently denatured by Hollywood ? I try to impose myself like a witness of something, a privileged spectator. I can thus swim, dance inside the other characters. I have this memory to become the principal hero of the films to which I assist. You can try to give a direction to your life and the end, realize that there is none of it. I never tried to give a great direction to my films, somehow like amateurs. I just try to replace my energy and my feeling on the screen. In general, I have neither goods scenarii, nor good dialogues, but I make use of it as detonators while trying thereafter to remain myself.

• As recalled by Vincent Gallo in Arizona Dream, the main thing is to be an artist even if you're a missed artist…
  • EK : Feelings are often contrary to what cinema wants to say. Then, you can decide to remain apart from the system. Fortunately, in my case, even if I do not move in a very traditional way, I can nevertheless touch a broad audience, to share the emotions I have and to offer to the others. There is the direction, I think, of the sentence pronounced by Vincent Gallo. A missed artist and an artist are the same. The main thing is to test something ; it is not serious if there are only two people to listen to you. We approach the end of the century and all the forms of classic art are exhausted. But, on the other side, these forms are still used especially in the cinema, because nobody found other solutions, other ways. My idea is simple : if I bring energy, the pure art, I mean not calculated, even if the way or the message of film do not match completely to what people wait, they come and sit in front of the screen. They know there is no cheating and they can be identified, come with their heart without preconceived opinion.

• “Women, like the salt, are not essential, but life is more insipid without them”, dixit the father in Dolly Bell. What is your opinion of women ?
  • EK : People I talk about in my films come from small countries, natural regions, like me. They clearly do not have this problem in head, do not make really the distinction between the sexes : the things are as they are. Preparing my films, all except perhaps the first one which is very close to me adolescent, in a very autobiographical direction, I never insinuated anything which can in a way or another make believing in an unspecified difference between the roles of women and the roles of men. I became aware of this problem during the shooting of When father was away on business. I said to myself : “If we made the film on the Mother” ; and I quickly realized that adopting this bias could become so complex, so near to Freud and the psychoanalysis, that I fled in another direction. I preferred to get out of this danger. So dramatically speaking, the man and the woman remain on the same level, also treated and shown. Since, I try to maintain it like that, to remain in the medium to be able to look in the two directions. I am not inevitably objective compared to everyday life in the various religions. But the films, according to the devoted expression, must be “bigger than life”. They have for me the function to make discover and to show the share of humanity able to include all the sins of the world.

• Do you consider yourself as a craftsman ?
  • EK : I have a problem with contemporary cinema. For me, manufacture of films is comparable with that of carpets. This is how I represent my way of making cinema. When I see very beautiful carpets, I compare them with films well done, that for a simple reason. I never start with the feeling to have a “beautiful history” in which a young woman would fall in love with a very beautiful young man and a brilliant history of love would follow then. I do not have the impression to have a powerful and controllable basic material. What excites me, is the manufacturing process, which points out the craft industry of the carpet to me, made of a certain number of small nothings which should be sought, of combined colours, of an extension of disparate feelings mixed harmoniously, but nothing very rational in any case. It results in a very rare association that very few directors can offer, as they are trampled by the industry and the old ramparts of the cinema.

• Your heroes are underprivileged. Their gifts are not used a priori for large thing, but prove to be major assets to draw the alarm bell from the society (Malik the sleepwalker, Dino the hypnotist, Perhan the forks bender, Grace the flying girl…). What do you think about it ?
  • EK : It is the initial apprehension I have of the design of a film, completely anti-rational. I need the torments inherent in this option. I claim them because they help me to escape to me from the gravity. I think that it is the way in which films must be conceived, and not like science fiction films, at least most of them, which hide physically behind explosions, but with a human touch, at the manner of Chagall's paintings. I deeply think that the idea even of a film and its team is intrinsically beautiful, but it moves, it is not static. I live in this end of century and I feel the need “to move” the things. This is why, if I have an immediate chance to show that a person fell in love in a visual way, to show the things while flying in the sky, I seize it without problem. I think that films are paintings of reality. I was always impressed, filled with wonder by the way in which Chagall depicts all his fabulous characters, contorsionned in incredible positions. It shows that all is possible, people can fly away, float in space. Why would this be impossible?
    Today, optics, the way of “touching” the audience changed. Look at MTV and their clips all day along in which the formal respect of optics is diverted. In Arizona Dream, I tried to transfigure the relation between Johnny Depp and Faye Dunaway. They don't say “I love you” but it is even stronger than that. It is at the same time natural and deeply existential. Perhaps I moved away a little from Dolly Bell which however functioned in the same way, but I think that artistically the comprehension of my films don't rise enormous problems. They all use pure realism to turn into something which holds more magic, a diving in the unreal. The most significant thing at the end, is that I never left on the way my substantial and basic connection to realism. I did nothing but select from them parts that I combine then with other more irrational elements, but that remains realism.

• Is there an exit to our society elsewhere than in dreams ?
  • EK : I do not see an exit. People have expected one for 2000 years. Perhaps that the century in which we live makes things more sophisticated and we forget to say that the main thing is to emancipate the individual. In fact, this century takes a malicious pleasure to improve what surrounds us by leaving the man to the drift. This is my greatest fear. People become so rationalist that the exit (mentioned by Dostoevsky, which approximately explains that the man must always find a solution to his problems, at least that this solution exists), this exit thus, only exists for those who agree to dream, to recognize itself in this simple mirror of the human spirit. I personally consider that the human dreams are the only refuge of the heart and its repercussions in reality. Our planet is overflowed by the social and political, also historical problems. Technology God is not supposed to solve them, it is just the result of the development of this century in which the man is obliged to prove something unceasingly. And for the woman it is the same. The dream then seems a marvellous retirement, a folding screen intended to preserve the noblest part of the mankind. The computers will never manage to read the dreams. It is a safeguard for us, to differentiate us…

• Isn't the return to reality more difficult ?
  • EK : Of course, reality is a great issue. It is what is seen by tired eyes, a reduced brain. Also the subjective aspect of reality is distorted by the weight of the centuries, the yoke of those who controlled humanity, by the fear and the misery which rose from it. The power in a hand, poverty in the other, especially today where the trip of the ego is so developed. I do not feel the prospect for a nearest development of the initial level human being.

• Your films are desperate and at the same time terribly joyful. Is this a form of extremism ?
  • EK : I don't know. It depends on where you place yourself. I dream only of comedies but I never succeed, probably because of my genes, of my heredity, connected on the tragic wave of life in the Balkans from where I come, who prevent me from going completely towards the comedy.

• There are also these symbols : the balloon, present in three films like a link ; Animals, in particular the turkey and the fish. What do they really mean ?
  • EK : The fish in Arizona Dream is a very good example of my way of creating metaphors. The fish means loneliness, something huge for me, a kind of opposition between a rational explanation and the history of humanity. Each time I look at the eyes of a fish, I see a mark of real intelligence, something of very human also, completely contrary to the human being history, of his route and his social and historical rise. The fish is thus for me the essence of human being, its fundamentalism, preserved of any change. That confirms the idea that the man comes from the sea, a fish. I do not believe in linear development of humanity history. I believe rather in metaphysic things of the kind “the fish doesn't think because the fish knows everything”. Anyway, it is the impression I have each time I meet a fish. The problem is to introduce it into a serious and not very cheap film without running up against the opinion of some spectators who would not understand its meaning. The only thing that I can say to them, it is that they don't have to understand, just to support the trouble during 2h15, and that's all ! In the opposite, it is possible to find a rational explanation to the incursion of fish. If you go to the cinema, who obliges you to understand instantaneously what you see ?
    When I arrived in America, I felt like a fish. Not a fish in its natural elements but rather in sand ; certainly not like a bird free and flying, but like a foreigner in a funny aquarium. As for the turkey of Time of the Gypsies, it belongs to a private mythology, a tradition. Even when it is eaten by the uncle, the tragedy makes its appearance in the film. When the gypsy family eats the turkey, it is to some extent to divert the destiny of Perhan. All that could take place before is like the nightmare which separates childhood and adulthood. I do not have significance for the balloon. I am just attracted and fascinated by his geometrical forms. The circle is a significant figure in my life and I try to connect it to my work as a director.

• What about these recurring images : Flight, initiation, present in all your films… ?
  • EK : I do not try to create symbols at any price. I just want to position my heroes in the risks of life, provided with the obligatory passports which are the funeral ceremonies, parties, Weddings or birthdays, always celebrated as one would celebrate spring. It is always a mixture, subtle I hope, of realism and surrealism. I suppose that you will find these symbols in my next films, but it is not calculated at all.

• By the way, what will be your next film ?
  • EK : Before starting “Crime and punishment”, a 16mm film in the current New York, I will shoot Underground¹⁾. It will be a Serbo-Croatian film, about two partisans during the Second World War who hide people in the basements of Belgrade. One of them has an affair with a rich woman. At the end of the war, he becomes aware that he can preserve the love of the young woman only by remaining in the underground and making her believe that the war continues. He would not be able to offer her the standards of living outside. He is thus obliged to make believing to a whole people that the conflict persists and to persuade them to organize a world inside the world. It is the door open to all kinds of traffics. It will be a dramatic comedy.

• You always try to escape from the terrestrial attraction, to see the city from above. Explain us that…
  • EK : My desire is to be at the place of the angels, to dream as dream young people. To adopt the point of view of the Angel to know how the human spirit can levitate. If you take a camera, you realize that you can go everywhere where the spirit goes, to infiltrate in the fantasies. You can do everything with a camera. For my part, I can film what my heart feels, it is what I feel each time I make a film. The camera is made only to represent the interior of your heart in a limpid way. You can place it at the height you want, to give the vision angle you wish. It is just an instrument.

• The act of love is generally violent, impassioned, agreeing and forced at the same time. What do you think ?
  • EK : This is my temperament, calm and violent at the same time. I certainly have explosions which cut with my apparent phlegm. It is something very personal you know. I like the extremes and my films show it also. In my life like in my films, I can be very tender and very angry. I like the ultimate human feelings which combine so many different elements at the same time. The act of love cannot be disconnected from this fact. If you observe the Animals, you will realize that they can be very brutal and very tender in a rather short lapse of time. If you compare Animals to men, you will see that they protect their family naturally, without hatred, like men. I try to behave like an animal, to find healthy extremes.

• From all that arise simple things. Everything is easy to make, and anyone can make it, but the famous gifts who strew your films and make them bend in the most total onirism. Is this a manner of bending reality in fiction ? To perhaps reduce it and to make it acceptable ?
  • EK : Both join. It is not a deliberated artistic intention. I think that life is heavy, not that easy. Then, when I start a film, most of the time, I try to leave what there is the best in me to help the spectators to fly away a little, to escape from the prison reality, marked out permanently. I hope that my metaphors turn life easier to them during a moment. It is my first and only wish : to be able, would it be only one second, to change the life of people…

• You have an attraction for water, anyway, the liquid element (the shower in Dolly Bell, the wedding dream in Time of the Gypsies, the rain in Arizona Dream), repairing, even saving ?
  • EK : As I said previously, I use some elements with which I want to play. It is my point of view, what I want to do. I have some elements, very close, that I carry with me. Thus, the rain appears in each one of my films and, in a certain way, in my life. I do not want to venture further.

• Drama meets permanently the comedy and heights are reached at the time of the dinner, in Arizona Dream, which culminates by an omnipresent figure in your work : missed Hangings (the water flush in Father, the scene of the bell in Time of the Gypsies, nylon stocking in Arizona Dream). Can one say that your films are tragi-comedies ?
  • EK : Certainly. I try each time to make a comedy and I permanently arrive to the tragedy, despite my efforts. It is a thing in which I believe. The pure elements of life are essential in a film and influence it, especially if you're within the realistic film framework. You cannot escape from it. This is why I feel myself nearer to the technique of the carpet craftsmen than of that of the film manufacturers. If you look at paintings of Chagall, it is the same thing, it always uses the same colours. Formally speaking like substantially speaking. The missed suicides you mention proceed in the same way. They are not to be strictly accurate my “substance” but raise rather of my formal aspirations. They are there only to express my problems. I adopt the same attitude with other concepts relating to the life and his future. I try to take distance, to leave on my boat to more think of nothing other than the wind and the sea. When I return, the problems are always there and the only solution which remains is to laugh at it, at least if I can. It is the life and there is not an other alternative. The human life is made of extremes, you pass from the laughter to the tears permanently and you can do nothing there. I would like to make the pill easier to swallow thanks to the brightness of the colours that I bring in my films.

• Perhaps you arrive without knowing it, at the goal of the cinema : to make author films doubled of an undeniable sense of the show, in the noble sense of the term. Do you agree on his ?
  • EK : Yes! I do not feel in agreement with these films of pretentious author who claim to be pure products of art. I want nevertheless to remain in agreement with the period in which I live and this period is at the end of the century. I do not say that all these “trashy” films are to be avoided, but I do not seek either being popular to be known or glorified. I try to do something that looks like a small old shop, with plenty of Kitsch objects that you can admire or buy. These objects are disparate but script is always the same. I deeply believe in the topic of Kitsch, especially the American Kitsch which is the the most powerful signal emanating from this country. The Kitsch gives me hope, gives me desire for fighting CNN. It is the greatest fascination I have for the United States because it clarifies the ultimate human feeling of “the American way of life”. I acknowledge that I am impressed by the capacity of the Kitsch. I do not speak about the Kitsch politically of course, but more that of the street. The Kitsch is entirely present in the character played by Jerry Lewis in Arizona Dream, in a burlesque version.

• Didn't you grow too quickly ?
  • EK : Probably, and this is why I return regularly in the house of my childhood, with my roots, where remained my stronger impulses. I resource myself in Sarajevo, as soon as I have the time and the possibility.

• When I think that you are only 38 years old. How can you still improve ?
  • EK : It is difficult to answer this question but I think that there are always places where you can go, ways to be tested. I have now the technical skill to suitably make a film. The more I get older, the more I am sure not to have made my best film. There is of course a gap between believing in a better film and reaching that point finally. But I am always excited by the game of cinema, even giving birth is always painful. I am an optimistic.

• Where does this this faculty to make scenes sacred which could appear alleviating to others, come from ?
  • EK : I don't know. It is surely due to an alchemy between the history itself and my rough way to transcribe it, the form that I give to it. In the majority of the films I see, their makers mix the emotions and the feelings. They manufacture the feelings where the emotions are not natural. They do not regard the human being as capable of emotion but like sentimental, it is very different. The feelings remain on the surface, on the level of the skin, while the emotions are born inside. It is what is the most difficult to explain to people of Hollywood. They do not understand this subtlety at all. Perhaps this is also due to my use of metaphors. For example, as near as I would be from reality, I permanently try to escape from it. It is a need because the things seem marvellous for me, and I inevitably do not have the same explanation of marvellous as some of my fellow-members, who try to impress at all prices. I would like to establish my own world, with metaphors full with direction while sticking in permanence to reality with the proviso of being able to escape from it from will. I also have an extraordinary director of photography who is able to make each scene marvellous.

• Tell us about your adolescence. Did you live on a hill ?
  • EK : Yes! I grew up on a hill (Gorica). An advantageous position to learn to fly, to adopt the point of view of the angel. I started to make cinema by chance almost. To earn some money, I used to deliver heating coal to the local cineclub where were projected old films. It is there that I discovered Visconti's “Senso”. I did not really understand it but I felt that there was something significant on the screen. Thereafter, Fellini's “Strada” completely upset me and definitively convinced me to make cinema. The golden age of the Italian cinema offered me the bases to begin in this trade. This “neo-realism”, as it's called, was an inexhaustible source for the maintenance and the development of my passion, because it had all a film needs : powerful emotions, possibility of finding his way inside the history. Neo-realism and coal led me to carry out my first shorts. Back to this hill, the vision of the city that I had influenced surely the eye of my camera and supported the angles that I like now.

• What is your social background ?
  • EK : The middle class, the same one as in When father was away on business, but I could have access to the cinema only because one of my aunts lived in Prague. Thanks to that, I could go to the school of the cinema of Prague, that of Miloš Forman, a very difficult admission because pupils of the whole world came to study there. The advantage of this school is that we had many practical work. I finished my studies with two half an hour films, and two shorts, 35mn obviously. I had a strong theoretical teaching, rich of anecdotes but especially, and it is the main thing, of an intensive technical work. The significant thing is “to touch” the material film.

• Is the Sheikh in Time of the Gypsies an homage to Marlon Brando in the Godfather ?
  • EK : The problem is that, if I say to you no, you will believe that I lie because Sheikh has indeed a small air of Brando, but I cannot answer yes to this question. It is unconscious. I saw many films, in particular those of Coppola, and it is possible that I was influenced by certain more than by others. All that is not made consciously is projected in the unconscious and you cannot be aware of it, just as you cannot resist your unconscious. It is also a problem for a director to permanently see his films peeled, analysed. The films belong to the public and not to their creator. Each spectator can and must have his vision. We must respect it. Personally, I have neither time nor will to look behind me, I prefer concentrating on the future.

• You like the “false ends”. Your films bounce several times before being completed in a ridiculous or simple way. Does that mean that the great stories are condemned to finish in a banal manner ? Or can never finish ?
  • EK : I think that the “end” is very existential, made of resolutions and contractions. It depends much on the construction of the film as a whole. In certain ends, today, the idea is to check and justify the logic of the film, to solve the problems. Thus each one can leave his seat without much anguish, satisfied by crescendo of the dramatic intensity. Personally, I wish to finish my films on a more ridiculous tone, near to a certain way of my sexual instincts. I always try finishing on a calm note, like after an act of violent and passionate love. In Arizona Dream, the fish goes away on the Antarctic. Even if this situation is not very traditional for some, I find it personally very ordinary, near to the end of a western where the hero goes away once his mission accomplished. The great final would have been to finish five minutes before, at the moment of the suicide of Lily Taylor. I prefer to finish on a door opened, on this Kitsch toy which I built in the United States and which I found in this famous old shop, full of inanimate ideas which only requiring to take life.

• You cannot go backward anymore now. Where do you want to go ?
  • EK : I will just leave the path I borrowed a few years ago. I had left a little on side what happened in my country. Thanks to or because of my work, I became impermeable to certain things, like in a cocoon. I want to imply me again in what is still my country. I want reconnect with life, in particular with the next films I will carry out. I certainly will anchor myself a little more in France because it is one of the countries, with the United States, where one can make films under good conditions. By the way, I have a project : to turn in French, with Gerard Depardieu. It is very exciting to turn in this language I do not speak. It is a challenge. France is the country that respects the most the authors. You know, if there is something good in my films, it's not only the team but the spirit in which they are made, and I try to preserve this spirit. I will surely go back to the USA to film there “Crime and Punishment” in the streets of New York, in the manner of a documentary, with my amateur handy camera and a reduced team.

• Explain us a this passage to adulthood, always painful ?
  • EK : I do not explore only the passage to adulthood, but the passage towards nowhere. I seek to wedge people in a space or a time in which they are not completely defined, not formed. I try to collect quite precise periods of the life which join my personal interrogations, my most important aspirations. I refuse to see the final things, I prefer when things are definitively connected to a “nowhere”, between a man and a child. It is there that I feel myself best and I think that it is valid for no matter whom.

• Can one consider you as humanistic ?
  • EK : I think yes, although it is a difficult word nowadays. It is true that I love people, definitively. For me, the family has a mythical dimension in which you can insert the drama at will. The family is the core of the drama, the epicentre of a dramatic development in any art. In the majority of the books I consult, if the family always in the centre of the action, it appears inside of the history. Even if you have a solitary hero, you wonder one moment or another what are his roots, of which family is he resulting ? In the country from where I come, the family occupies the most important place.

• Your films talk, among other, about the precariousness of the life, a way so strong which one has the impression to discover. What do you think about it ?
  • EK : I think that it is closely related to my design of the drama. In my films, it is difficult to know what will occur afterwards. Each scene functions in an autonomous way and creates to some extent a feeling of insecurity for the spectator. My films are sometimes difficult to follow. The bounces do not certainly appear where they are awaited, because of the precariousness about which you speak. But the life also is precarious. You have in vain your job, your insurances, you do not know therefore what will arrive to you tomorrow. My films are like the life but are not assured. If you study their skeleton, you cannot pre-empt their outcome.

• Isn't there a point of nihilism in Arizona Dream ?
  • EK : I don't know. I suppose that each opus listed is based on the way in which its author fought the nihilism. I do not want to be the “obsolete” director who would claim a special confrontation with the nihilism, but I am constrained, like any artist, to meet it sometimes. If I use the nihilism or some of his aspects, it is for better demolishing it. That's all !

• What did you lose since you make cinema ? Innocence perhaps ?
  • EK : Certainly! You loose innocence and many other things, but apparently, by the grace of art and its nature, you become able to select the most significant things and give them order. Thus, I loose indeed my innocence, but immediately, almost wildly, I find the resources to rebuild my life and to make it stronger.

• Could you live without shooting ?
  • EK : I don't think so, because each time I try to remember an important moment of my life, it always returns by the means of my work, even if it is not directly related to the shooting of a film. The cinema helps me to preserve my memory of the things. What would be a man without his memory ?

• There are also this rare thing, this perfect osmosis between the image and the sound which multiplies by ten the emotion. Few directors understood it, even if some start to consider the music with its right value. You were born in the music, undoubtedly ?
  • EK : Yes, I was even a guitarist some times in a rock'n'roll group which was called ”no smoking”. My last film, particularly, shows something very significant. We permanently ask questions while working in art. The worst would be to want to accelerate the destruction of the existing forms to impose new of them. I believe that in Time of the Gypsies and in Arizona Dream, we made a success of a mixture of both : to take in the old while excavating in the modern. Let's stop confining us in kinds. There are no musical films at 100% and dramas at 100%, nor police films at 100%. It is necessary to be useful of materials, to use what there is the best in them. The collision of the music and the image serves the emphasis of my films and each part makes them better. I think that they are experimental for this reason, closer to technological things like the compact-disc in a sense, while preserving the emotion, the traditional cinema.

• Tell us about these three mythical first films Guernica, The brides are coming and Titanic.
  • EK : It's very difficult for me, it's the past now. What I can do is to give you some details. It's the first part of my life in which I tried to reproduce what I had learned while looking from other films. Guernica taught me how to think only in filmic, practical terms if you prefer. The two others helped me to make me the hand. I do not disavow them at all, they are very important for me because they act as detonators. I was then like a blind man searching the light. The only thing that I can say to you is that their style resembles my other incursions into the cinema.

• What is the influence of your birthplace in your films ?
  • EK : Sarajevo is one of the strangest cities of Europe : an old city, where ethnic groups of various confessions live together. Located at the edge of Europe, you could believe that it has a foot in Asia. In “the letter of 1920”, Ivo Andrić says Sarajevo is a city which, in a restricted space, would join together four temples : the catholic church, the orthodox church, the synagogue and the mosque. A person on the old market place at midnight could hear the songs of all the religions. This is, for me, the most significant of the history of Sarajevo and its possible influence on my work.

Interview by Jean-Marc Bouineau, translation by Matthieu Dhennin