"I see a man as a fish passing through a huge city. The fish doesn’t understand anything..." Emir Kusturica about "Arizona Dream"

  Emir Kusturica went to New York to teach at Columbia University, without any intention of making a film. But after two years in America, he had found the subject for his new film. "I had made three films that were all involved with my childhood and the problems that I personally had" he explains. "Now I wanted to extend that and tell other people’s stories. I don’t know how it will affect what I do in the future, but it’s a great adventure, a big experience."

  "Arizona Dream" grew out of collaboration with David Atkins, one of his American students. "He had initially written a script that was an action story about a murder. I don’t find the mechanics of that sort of story very interesting. So together we constructed a script out of our imaginations, based partly on his experiences and partly on mine."

  "I suppose you could call "Arizona Dream" a tragic-comedy, if such a genre exists. It’s about a young man who wanders into what is actually a hell that exists between two women, because of the tragedy in their lives. I’ve tried to make the foreground very light, but with a structure that’s based on a very thought story. What I am always trying to do is to find the borderline between the comic and the serious moments, and there’s no mathematical equation to help you with that. The script is just a starting point: what’s important to me is what happens between the characters, in front of the camera."

  "You can complain about the culture shock and whatever else you have to survive when you’re doing a movie in the States for the first time, but the one thing you can’t say is that they don’t have the best actors in the world. I mean film actors. There’s a very big choice, and they’re really good. Probably the most important thing about this new generation of actors is that they’re ready to co-operate. They know that to make a good scene, it doesn’t just have to be good for one person, it has to be about what happens between different actors."

  "In 80% of the current production in America they are using actors in a very naturalistic way, which tries to pretend there is no difference between life and the movie. I think that the movie has to be different than life, has to be bigger than life. American actors have such great potential, it’s just a question how to use that energy for a common thing, and not simply to create a star performance that looks naturalistic. And I think it’s possible if the actors trust you and you trust the actors to be as good as they can be. But you can only do it away from the machinery of Hollywood."

  "It’s like a triangle: East Cost, Far North, and Southwest, right on the border with Mexico. I was going from one extreme to other, and in between I’ve tried to tell a tender, funny love story. It wasn’t difficult for me to identify with the location, because I come from a small provincial community in Yugoslavia which corresponds with any provincial community in the world. There’re certain rules that are the same everywhere. And a love story is a love story."

  "It could be that this movie is my reaction to how I see Western civilizations. It comes from a kind of philosophy I’ve established after 35 years of living on this planet. I believe that human beings belong to nature, not to civilization. And I see a man as being like a fish passing through a huge city. The fish doesn’t understand anything about the city, he’s just floating through it. What I’m trying to do, always, is to get people wondering."