List of Michael Haneke Quotes

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.

It Became A Gamble To Myself Whether I Was Able To Do The Exact Same Film ["funny Games"]under Very Different Circumstances.

People Have Been Educated To Expect Answers, Even Before The Questions Come Along. It's The Tv Principle. You Offer Three Possible Answers Before The Questions Come To Relax And Calm The Audience.

When Ideas Lead To Ideology, That's A Very Dangerous Thing. Ideology Then Leads To Creating The Image Of An Enemy, And It Leads To The Murder And Massacre.

I Never Suffered From The Absence Of A Father. On The Contrary, As A Child I Was More Inclined To See Men As A Disturbing Factor. It Made Things Difficult For Me When I Started Working As A Director.

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.

I Learned My Business In The Theater And In Television, Particularly Working With The Actors. You Can Learn Much More In The Theater Than Directing A Movie, Because Then You Have No Time When You Are Shooting A Movie To Really Work With The Actors. You Have To Learn This Craft Somewhere Else.

There Are Really Two Types Of Laughter On The Part Of The Spectator. There Is The Laughter Of Recognition - Which Means Seeing Things You're Familiar With And Laughing At Yourself. But There's Also Hysterical Laughter - A Way Of Dealing With The Things We See That Upset Us.

What We're Doing For Another Person Is More Important Than What We're Feeling For Them.

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.

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.

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.