It's the sort of weather that would bring Britain to a standstill, but this is Serbia, so we plough on through the snowstorm, doing speeds that cause the police to try to stop the car — once successfully. Our destination is Küstendorf in the Dinaric Alps, four hours’ drive from Belgrade, to meet the film-maker Emir Kusturica.

Since Do You Remember Dolly Bell? in 1981, followed by the film that launched him internationally, Time of the Gypsies in 1998, he has specialised in realising insane, carnivalesque schemes in which the striking image and poetic flight of fancy is king. If you want a reason why his followers are so avid, consider the awards he has gathered in three distinct disciplines: two Palme d’Or (for When Father was away on Business and Underground) and a best director for Cannes (Time of the Gypsies); gold discs for his musical hobby, the No Smoking Orchestra; and the Philippe Rotthier European Architecture Award, for Küstendorf, the village he has created. He is also a Unicef Amabssador for Serbia.

We arrive in Küstendorf to find Kusturica, 54, waiting in the bar, and we agree to meet the next morning, after I’ve had a look around his village, which he built on the slopes of Mokra Gora (“Wet Mountain”) to be his own Utopia.

“I’ve been looking for a home since I left Sarajevo in 1988,” he says. “I lived in Paris for 15 years, but I thought, ‘Why not make my own city?’ The vision was not so big, one or two streets. Now we can have 105 guests and employ 45 people.” In a move he describes as “artistically provocative” he called it Küstendorf, using the first four letters of his name and “dorf” (hill) from German. “Historically, we Serbs have had problems with the Germans,” he laughs.

Despite little marketing, it is now a tourist destination, its timber cabins becoming romantic hideaways for Serbs seeking somewhere inaccessible for a couple of nights. There are cafés, shops, an Orthodox church, a pool, a restaurant and a ski slope, even an annual film festival.

The next morning he is an hour late: he injured his leg playing football in the gym. Looking as if he uses the same personal grooming service as the chef Marco Pierre White, he orders a coffee and leans back in his chair. I am here, however, not to ask him about his feature films or even architecture, but about music and football, because his band, the No Smoking Orchestra, and his documentary about Maradona are coming to the Barbican in London next Saturday.

He is raw on the subject of the latter, however, as English critics have been scathing. “The reviews killed me. Maradona scored hundreds of goals, and one was with his hand, and that outraged the English football mentality. So to them the film becomes not about who was the best footballer of all time — it’s him — but about a cheat.”

Maradona is much more significant than the “Hand of God” goal, he says. “Maradona is as big a bandit as Joe Strummer, and he was no bandit, he was rebellion.”

Phew, a chance to reroute the discussion towards music. Kusturica stands accused of being a conservative, yet sitting here surrounded by posters of Che and Pancho Villa, there is much about him that conjures up an unreconstructed 1960s radical, the sort who dreamt of building his own Woodstock and now finds that he has.

His own band, the No Smoking Orchestra, was once called by Strummer “a crazy Greek-Jewish wedding band”, which somehow sums them up beautifully despite being almost entirely wrong. “But we were very multi-ethnic, really,” says Kusturica, their rhythm guitarist, “and this was typical of Sarajevo in the 1970s and 1980s.Sarajevo was very special, internationalist. Even our sense of humour was better, very ironic.”

Before Kusturica joined, the Orchestra (Zabranjeno Pusenje in Serbo-Croat) had its own television programme and were selling hundred of thousands of copies of each album. Sadly, in 1984, the singer, Dr Nele Karajlic, made a joke about Tito that meant that they were removed from the state’s list of favoured artists (even though Tito had been dead for four years). The film-maker, having just won his Golden Palm for When Father was Away on Business, was asked to join in the hope that his prestige would protect the band.

Five years later, as Kusturica made his Hollywood film Arizona Dream, Yugoslavia was falling apart. The band followed suit, with most remaining in Sarajevo while their singer fled to Serbia. As a result, Zabranjeno Pusenje are still working in Sarajevo, while the No Smoking Orchestra are busy in Belgrade, although the latter needed a Kusturica connection to ignite their career, recording music for his film Black Cat, White Cat in 1998.

This was a new band, playing new music in a folk-punk style. Albums such as Unza Unza Time and the soundtrack to the “punk opera” Time of the Gypsies built a fanbase that paved the way for Gypsy-punk acts such as Gogol Bordello. He says: “The concerts are the only promotion we have. Yet each show makes another ten. Everybody wants to see us again. You have the Pogues, one of the greatest bands of this kind. Knowing the English crowds at football, all these violent people, I think they are going to go f***ing crazy.”

His son, Stribor, comes over to remind him that he has business at the ski slope. But before he disappears into the storm, I ask how he wants to be remembered: film director, rock star, mayor of his own town? “Since Yugoslavia broke up, I made Underground, Super 8 Stories, I made music,” he replies, solemnly. “From the ruins of my previous life I was energised by art in many ways. So . . . you can call me a war profiteer.” He is laughing loudly as he leaves.

Emir Kusturica and the No Smoking Orchestra, Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891), May 9

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