165 Quotes by Michael Haneke

My mother as a young girl went out with a young SS officer and she didn’t really know what was going on – she just liked the uniform. When he told her about the things that he did, she was disgusted and broke up with him.

I’m not someone who enjoys long talks, long rehearsals. I’m very technical: I tell my actors, you come in, you sit down, you pick up a coffee, you look here, you say the line. We try it with the cameras rolling, and if it doesn’t work, we adjust it until it does. It’s very simple.

Personally, I can’t stand violence. In any standard American mainstream movie, there’s 20 times more violence than in any one of my films, so I don’t know why those directors aren’t asked why they’re such specialists for violence.

Because in the feudal system of that period at least 80% of people lived in villages, so it’s very simple to get a cross-section of society in a single village. You get the microcosm of the social macrocosm.

Usually music is used to hide a film’s problems.

What I like are films that take me seriously, that don’t treat me as more stupid than I am.

Film is simply the most complex way you can express yourself.

Awards are important for all directors because they improve your working conditions. You’re only as good as your last film, so if you get prizes or large audiences, then you get more money for your next film.

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.