Michael Haneke
I'm far more relaxed with German. I'm a control freak. I like to know exactly who's saying and doing what.
And if there was one title that could be applied to all my films, it would be 'Civil War' - not civil war in the way we know it, but the daily war that goes on between us all.
Writers and filmakers, that is, people who describe the world, suffer from an occupational disease. They never experience moments in life quite spontaneously. You always look at yourself from the outside. Even as a child I always observed myself and the world. I believe that everyone who chooses this path in any way, who chooses to be a describer of life, suffers from this condition. It's like a mental obsession. It can be a great pity too. It robs you of a certain joy in spontaneity.Collection: Children
Film is simply the most complex way you can express yourselfCollection: Way
I'm not really a happy person. It's a question of temperament. I have a tendency toward melancholy. You can feel quite happily melancholic.Collection: Melancholy
If I tell the audience what they should think, then I am robbing them of their own imagination and their own capacity of deciding what's important to them.Collection: Thinking
Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.Collection: Lying
My feeling, however, is that films that are open are more productive for the audience. The films that, if I'm in a cinema, and I'm watching a movie that answers all the questions that it raises, it's a film that bores me. In the same way, if I'm reading a book that doesn't leave me with questions, moving questions, that I feel confronted with, then for me it's a waste of time. I don't want to read a book that simply confirms what I already know.Collection: Moving
It's the duty of art to ask questions, not to provide answers. And if you want a clearer answer, I'll have to pass.Collection: Art
I think that what's important as a director is to give your actors the feeling that they're protected, the feeling of confidence, the feeling that if they make mistakes, then as a director, you'll know how to help them. If you're able to convey that, then the actors will give you wonderful performances. As well as the author, you have to write scenes that give the actors the opportunity to show what they're capable of.Collection: Mistake
Unfortunately, you're helpless when people interpret your work wrongly. There are simply people who can't or won't understand or accept what you're trying to do. When you take the risk of expressing yourself in public, you have to open yourself to that possibility.Collection: People
If someone's lying to us, then it's rare that we know that they're lying to us. It's only in bad films that you recognize immediately that an actor's playing in such a way that you can see that he's lying, and that's simply dumb. But to reach that, it requires that you make a film in such a way that a spectator feels compelled to find his own explanation. You want to lead the spectator to find his own interpretation. To ask questions rather than provide all of the answers. Doing that leads to open endings and open dramaturgy.Collection: Lying
When making a film, I'm never concerned about whether the theme is new or whether it's been done before in cinema or not. I'm led to make films if there's a theme that interests me or I experience something in my own life that confronts me with something that I want to deal with.Collection: Cinema
Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable.Collection: War
My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.Collection: Distance
I think watching a movie that simply confirms my feelings is a waste of time. That applies not only to movies, but also to books and every form of art.Collection: Art
I like to write for actors I know and with whom I've worked before. You can write to their strengths and weaknesses and write roles that are better suited to them.Collection: Writing
I’ve been accused of ‘raping’ the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely — all movies assault the viewer in one way or another.Collection: Way
It could be Fascist, religious or political - it's always the same model that operates in these circumstances, and it's that which is the actuality of this film. Therefore, it's not specifically an explanation of German Fascism because that would be an impossible thing to do in any case.Collection: Religious
Like every filmmaker, I make my films to reach the widest audience possible.Collection: Film
In general, in all my films, I choose to create a certain mistrust, rather than claiming that what I'm showing onscreen is an accurate reproduction of reality. I want people to question what they are seeing onscreen. In the same way as I used the narrator, I also used black and white, because it creates a distance toward what's being seen. I see the film as an artifact rather than a reliable reconstruction of a reality that we cannot know.Collection: Distance
Of course I am a child of European culture. There are a number of great directors from which I learned, but there is nobody in particular I got inspired from.Collection: Children
When you create a church, an institution, and you create a dogma. When you create an ideology, that's the danger. Communism, too, is a beautiful idea, but millions of people died when communism became an ideology.Collection: Beautiful
It's much harder to write a script that involves two people in a single location than 20 people in 30 different locations.Collection: Writing
If I'm reading a book that doesn't leave me with questions, moving questions, that I feel confronted with, then for me it's a waste of time. I don't want to read a book that simply confirms what I already know.Collection: Moving
Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. And I think it's healthy to return to classical forms.Collection: Thinking
It’s harder to write a story with just two people in a room than with 50 characters.Collection: Writing
You'll see more violence in any television crime series than you will in my films Art is there to have a stimulating effect, if it earns its name. You have to be honest, that's the only thing.Collection: Art
A strict form such as mine cannot be achieved through improvisation.Collection: Form
The smaller and younger kids are, the more patient you have to be. But if they're gifted, then it's a wonderful present that you're given by having a child like that in your film... more so than in the case of actors because, for example, if you ask them to play a lion, they don't then play a lion, they actually are a lion. So, a gifted child is something very special. On the other hand, if a child has no gifts in that way it's absolutely hopeless and there's nothing you can do!Collection: Children
I always seek to mobilize, to call on the imagination of the spectator. It's well-known that the images that are created by one's imagination are far stronger than any that I can show. In fact, it's an error, a widespread error in mainstream cinema, to always want to show things and to depict things.Collection: Imagination
I want to be able to control things and that's very difficult to do if you're not 100% in a particular language. It makes you uncertain and it makes you nervous.Collection: Want
You cannot hurt animals, so what do I do? I kill the dog first. Then I do it with the boy. You're not supposed to break the illusion of this being a film, so I make the actor talk to the audience. Provocation is the principle of the whole film [ Funny Games]. It is very ironic.Collection: Dog
In my film "Benny's Video," I depicted violence but I failed to say all that I had to say, so I wanted to continue the dialog and that's why I did "Funny Games." The irony is that after I shot "Funny Games," but it hadn't been released at all anywhere.Collection: Games
For me, it's always difficult when a historical film claims to depict or represent a reality that none of us can know, that is always different. It's always the case. We never know what happened then. So my approach with the narrator is to question that, to leave that open, to underline the fact that this is uncertain.Collection: Reality
The trouble is that when you read criticisms about the other films that I've made you get the impression that they're all about themes, or problems, or ideas. But those are actually things that develop out of characters, out of images and out of other things. These more abstract things develop while working on the material, and out of it. It's not a theoretical exercise from the outset.Collection: Character
Well, the first thing I had to do was to read a lot. First of all, about education... and looking at education from the Middle Ages right through to the 20th Century. The second major area was country life in the 19th Century, which I don't know much about these days.Collection: Country
You become a film critic because you're interested in film. I don't know whether knowing so much about cinema leads you to make better films, but it certainly can't hurt.Collection: Hurt
I think that religion is an integral part of human needs, but the question also is how you understand religion.Collection: Thinking
If you go with the principle, you should go with the principle. If I really saw the subject very differently than ten years ago, I would have done a different movie.Collection: Years
In German. I'm more sensitized to the details, to the emotions. In English, I wouldn't detect as much nuance.Collection: Details
In terms of cinema and filmmaking, there are certainly the unexpected gifts that the actors bestow on you. Film is always a question of compromises with respect to what you originally intended.Collection: Unexpected Gifts
Usually, when making a film, the surprises are negative surprises. You don't get what you wanted or what you hoped for. The only nice surprises are those that are offered to you by actors when they offer you these gifts, when they are better and give you more than what you had originally conceived. That doesn't happen every day on set, but if it happens a couple of times in the course of making a film, you can consider yourself very lucky.Collection: Couple
Film is the manipulative medium par excellence. When you think back on the history of film and the 20th century, you see the propaganda that's been made. So there are moral demands on the director to treat the spectators as seriously as he or she takes himself and not to see them merely as victims that can be manipulated to whatever ends they have.Collection: Thinking
If a director says he doesn't care how many people see his films at all, I simply don't believe him. Otherwise why would he bother to make the film? The only explanation would be that it would be an act of masturbation. I think that every creator is looking for a receptor. He's looking for an audience. There are two parts of the equation: a creator and, necessarily, the receiver of the work. It's the same thing for a painter who wants his paintings to be seen.Collection: Believe
The film [the white Ribbon] does try to use German Fascism as an example, but not specifically Fascism... the results of German Fascism. It shows how people are prepared or indoctrinated for an ideology... people who are already in a state of repression who have been humiliated by society and who clasp at a straw that's offered to them. And how that's then developed into a form of indoctrination.Collection: White
The dumber people are, the more they feel the need for a broad set of shoulders they can lay their head against.Collection: People
Every form of anti-Semitism, every form of xenophobia plays on the fear of the unknown, and unfortunately there are all too many politicians who know how to manipulate that. The dumber people are, the more they feel the need for a broad set of shoulders they can lay their head against.Collection: People