page_title: Srđan Dragojević
section_title: Return to Serbia
hierarchical_section_title: Srđan Dragojević / Cinematic career / Return to Serbia
caption_attribution_description: English: Srđan Dragojević (born 1963), Serbian film director and screenwriter.
context_page_description: Srđan Dragojević is a Serbian film director and screenwriter, who emerged in the 1990s as a significant figure in Serbian cinema.
  Since 2010, he has been a member of the Socialist Party of Serbia's main board. In late August 2013 he became an SPS MP in the Serbian National Assembly.
context_section_description: By 2001, Dragojević returned to his homeland without having made a film in America. With producer Biljana Prvanović, he founded a production company Delirium Films in 2002.
  In early 2003 he was announced as having been hired to develop a script for and eventually direct Beautiful Game, film based on Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical that had already been staged in London's West End. Along with a young American writer, Dragojević came up with an adapted screenplay from Ben Elton's story set in West Belfast during the 1970s about a group of Protestants and Catholics playing on the same football team as sectarian tensions surround them. However, in the end nothing came of it and years later Dragojević revealed in an interview that a row erupted with producers over his desire to remove two of the songs.
  Around the same time, he also tried to get several projects off the ground such as the post-Holocaust novel After by Melvin Jules Bukiet with producer friend Julia Rosenberg as well as a proposed film based on Julian Barnes' 1992 novel The Porcupine, but was unable to raise funds for either of them. He also had an idea for a film called 1999 Cum in the Rye that was conceptualized as the final installment of his 1990s trilogy, but it also couldn't raise enough funding.
  Suddenly, in summer 2004, he decided to make Mi nismo anđeli 2, the sequel to his greatest commercial hit after reportedly writing the screenplay from scratch in only three weeks. Shot in co-production with Pink International Company and released in early 2005, Mi nismo anđeli 2 broke box office records in Serbia with 700,000 admission tickets sold despite receiving bad reviews and even accusations of plagiarizing Stan Dragoti's 1989 comedy She's Out of Control. Dragojević himself on occasion referred to the film as an "open dialogue with the 1980s American B-comedy genre". Still, some observers saw his involvement in the project as an attempt at delivering a quick commercial box-office hit that would financially enable the projects he was really interested in making. Dragojević initially shied away from putting it in those terms, but several years later admitted as much explicitly in some interviews.
  Around the same time Dragojević wrote one of the script drafts for Uroš Stojanović's film Čarlston za Ognjenku that he wrote as a "screwball comedy or postmodern Frank Capra", however, Stojanović ultimately went into a different direction with the film.
  
  Right afterward, Dragojević started working on the third installment of the Mi nismo anđeli franchise. This resulted in Mi nismo anđeli 3: Rokenrol uzvraća udarac that he co-wrote with Dimitrije Vojnov, but left directing duties to Petar Pašić. The approach taken was along the lines of Hollywood cinema - the script was offered to seven directors each of whom had to make a pitch with Pašić chosen in the end. Still, the reviews were even worse than for the previous sequel and the movie was a failure at the box office. Summing up the Mi nismo anđeli sequels several years later in 2009, Dragojević said:
  You know, I fully understand and accept the animosity that both the industry people as well as the fans of the original feel towards the sequels. Anđeli 2 was made solely out of my desperate desire to raise funds for the project I fought for over three years - the film adaption of Julian Barnes' The Porcupine, a dark political thriller about communism and transition into capitalism. Anđeli 2 started doing really well at the theaters in 2005, but a bootleg copy soon appeared and although the film still made a nice profit, we didn't quite manage to raise the projected amount that was to serve as the initial funds for The Porcupine. I should also mention the veto slapped by the Bosnian representative at a Eurimages session, which pretty much killed any chance of The Porcupine being made. Furthermore, Anđeli 3 was part of the same package deal with Pink International Company that also included the 1999 project. However, after the film was shot, Pink Television changed their mind so that instead of being shown as a TV movie on P
caption: Dragojević on the set of St. George Shoots the Dragon in 2007
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