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

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'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.

Just because I believe in the identity and integrity of my country doesn't make a xenophobe or a nationalist.

The advantage of the gypsy language, even though I don't understand it that much, the language is perfect melody. So if you propose the movie the way I do, then the language is just one part of the melody. Orchestrating all inside, and the language is following the meaning of what they say, and it's never the same as written.

I am a living illustration of Bosnian mixing and converting. My grandparents lived in eastern Herzegovina. Very poor. The Turks came and brought Islam. There were three brothers in the family. One was Orthodox Christian. The other two took Islam to survive.