He briefly came back to poetry in 1995 as an already established film director to release Katkad valja pročitati poneku knjigu da ne ispadnete glupi u društvu.

What was essentially his FDU graduate thesis project, an irreverent youth comedy set in Belgrade about a geeky teenage girl who gets impregnated by a local lothario, turned out to be a huge cinema box-office hit in FR Yugoslavia and eventually in the rest of the former Yugoslav countries.

[8] In his numerous media appearances, Dragojević talked up his movie by expressing a personal opinion that with Mi nismo anđeli he "delivered a solid product that could hardly have been better than it is considering the circumstances it was made in".

However, the financial implosion of the state-owned production studio Avala Film amid galloping inflation in FR Yugoslavia put an end to that project.

Produced by influential Serbian show business agent-manager Raka Đokić [sr] whose clients included local top-selling young starlets of the folk music genre, the high-budget film was envisioned as twenty-five-year-old Dragana Mirković's cinematic platform meant to showcase her in a different light musically (more dance-pop less commercial folk) and thus increase her nationwide fame, much like Đokić had managed to do for his other famous client Lepa Brena several years earlier with her Hajde da se volimo film that grew into a hugely successful two-sequel revenue-generating franchise.

Attracted by his money, numerous Serbian film and music industry people (including Dragojević, Branka Katić, Nebojša Bakočević, Rambo Amadeus, etc.)

Four years after his debut, Dragojević finally returned to directing feature films - this time completely breaking out of the youth genre to tackle the gruesome issues related to the ongoing Yugoslav Wars with a controversial drama containing elements of dark comedy, Lepa sela lepo gore, set in war-torn Bosnia.

Therefore, the only tangible result of his brief flirtation with Hollywood on this occasion was the deal with Fox Lorber for the North American limited theatrical and home video distribution of Lepa sela lepo gore.

Loosely based on a true story, its plot follows the descent of two Belgrade youngsters from youthful exuberance into juvenile delinquency and hard criminality amid economic sanctions in FR Yugoslavia as their personal relationship transforms from close friendship to impulsively vicious rivalry.

Released in May 1998 and, like most local productions, funded in large part by state institutions such as the state-run broadcaster RTS, the film elicited a stern response from the government elements that did not appreciate the director's brutal portrayal of Milošević's Serbia.

Though they didn't ban the movie outright, they severely impacted its promotional cycle by refusing to run the film's ads in the state-run print and electronic media outlets.

Those fears didn't turn out to be unfounded as his attempts to raise funds for the film adaptation of Dušan Kovačević's 1984 theater play St. George Slays the Dragon quickly got shot down.

He thus called on his Hollywood connections in order to once again explore his options across the pond and soon opened negotiations with Miramax as he again started to get some interest from America including a January screening of Rane at the Sundance Film Festival.

From July 1999, with his Miramax deal announced,[19] Dragojević would end up spending the following two years living and working in the United States, initially in New York City.

The deal also functioned in the other direction whereby Miramax would offer him scripts, books, stories or re-make ideas they thought fit his sensibility and he'd have the right of refusal.

The announcement was made in November 2000 with Dragojević upbeat about the project he envisioned as a "funny and commercial film containing a unique mix of genres, including Shakespearean subplots and unpredictable structures".

Before that, among the pile of scripts my agent had been sending me, I read this thing called The Payback All-Star Revue, and I told her that it isn't all that bad—mostly out of desire to not have her thinking I'm some sort of nutcase who rejects everything.

I then spent the following six months fighting tooth and nail to improve the script, which from the creative standpoint was like being a cook who's been handed a bowl of excrement and asked to make a half-decent meal out of it.

[23][22] Summing up his Hollywood experience, Dragojević said:People in Europe view Miramax as this artsy and independent studio where directors have all the artistic freedom they want, but that's most definitely not the case.

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.

[31] 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.

[30] 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.

Suddenly, in summer 2004, he decided to make Mi nismo anđeli 2 [sr], the sequel to his greatest commercial hit after reportedly writing the screenplay from scratch in only three weeks.

[33] 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[34] despite receiving bad reviews[35][36] and even accusations of plagiarizing Stan Dragoti's 1989 comedy She's Out of Control.

Anđeli 2 was made solely out of my desperate desire to raise funds for the project I had 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 in 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.

However, the production company Nu Image led by Avi Lerner wanted the script re-written, a job that also went to Dragojević who in turn brought in Dimitrije Vojnov thus continuing their writing collaboration.

Dragojević then spent three months in Bulgaria doing preparation work with his set designer and director of photography, even flying out to locations in Morocco and Kazakhstan where parts of the movie were to be shot.

From Sergej Trifunović being fired as the lead and replaced with Milutin Milošević [sr] to cinematographer Miljen "Kreka" Kljaković walking off the project, the Serbian press detailed many of the on-set problems.

"[40] In late 2010, Dragan Bjelogrlić's film Montevideo, Bog te video that Dragojević co-wrote with Ranko Božić [sr] came out to positive reviews and great commercial success.