165 Quotes by Michael Haneke

It’s harder to write a story with just two people in a room than with 50 characters.

The difficulty, then, is 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.

It’s much harder to write a script that involves two people in a single location than 20 people in 30 different locations.

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.

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.

I’m interested in seeing films that confront me with new things, with films that make me question myself, with films that help me to reflect on subjects that I hadn’t thought about before, films that help me progress and advance.

If you do an original film and you want to cut a scene out you do it. But when you do a shot by shot remake you don’t have that option and every scene has to work again.

Drama lives on conflict. If you’re trying to deal with social issues seriously, there’s no way of avoiding violence, which is so present in society.

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.