Michael Haneke famous quotes

I give the spectator the possibility of participating. The audience completes the film by thinking about it; those who watch must not be just consumers ingesting spoon-fed images.
-- Michael Haneke

#Thinking #Giving #Spoons

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

#Writing #Two #People

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Children #Believe #People

It's more enjoyable to shoot in a studio on a single location with two actors...if they are good.
-- Michael Haneke

#Two #Location #Actors

An artist is someone who should raise questions rather than give answers. I have no message.
-- Michael Haneke

#Artist #Giving #Answers

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Mistake #Writing #Opportunity

Film is simply the most complex way you can express yourself
-- Michael Haneke

#Way #Film #Express Yourself

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Done #Want #Cinema

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Melancholy #Tendencies #Feels

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Thinking #Imagination #Important

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Cinema #Actors #Unexpected

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Couple #Nice #Giving

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Progress #Helping #Film

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Art #Book #Thinking

To me, it's far more efficient to mobilize the imagination. It's far more efficient to hear a creaking step, for example, than to see the face of a monster, which usually looks ridiculous, and where you know that the blood is ketchup.
-- Michael Haneke

#Blood #Imagination #Example

I've never let producers tell me what to do. Even when I was making television, I always did what I wanted to do, and if I couldn't, I didn't do it. It was a freedom that, these days, young directors starting out don't have.
-- Michael Haneke

#Television #Directors #These Days

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Children #Father #Men

I'm far more relaxed with German. I'm a control freak. I like to know exactly who's saying and doing what.
-- Michael Haneke

#Freak #Control Freak #Relaxed

As a private person, professionally I am invisible.
-- Michael Haneke

#Invisible #Persons

What we're doing for another person is more important than what we're feeling for them.
-- Michael Haneke

#Feelings #Important #Persons

Mainstream cinema raises questions only to immediately provide an answer to them, so they can send the spectator home reassured. If we actually had those answers, then society would appear very different from what it is.
-- Michael Haneke

#Home #Different #Cinema

It's impossible to consider living without ideals. However, 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 that we've seen since the beginning of time.
-- Michael Haneke

#Ideas #Creating #Enemy

It's a fact that people who are in a weakened position, whether physically or mentally, have this perception of the outer world as threatening. Everything that is unexpected or unknown is seen as a potential danger.
-- Michael Haneke

#People #Perception #World

People expect me to be dark and gloomy, then write that I'm a jolly chap, and after all, that is what I am. I think it's a case of an absolute romantic naivety that there should be a parallel between the work and the artist.
-- Michael Haneke

#Writing #Dark #Thinking

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Laughter #Mean #Two

I make my films because I'm affected by a situation, by something that makes me want to reflect on it, that lends itself to an artistic reflection. I always aim to look directly at what I'm dealing with. I think it's a task of dramatic art to confront us with things that in the entertainment industry are usually swept under the rug.
-- Michael Haneke

#Art #Reflection #Thinking

On the set I make jokes I can't get too involved, or it turns into sentimental soup. I try to keep it light.
-- Michael Haneke

#Light #Trying #Soup

I want to make it clear: it's not that I hate mainstream cinema. It's perfectly fine. There are a lot of people who need to escape, because they are in very difficult situations, so they have the right to escape from the world. But this has nothing to do with an art form.
-- Michael Haneke

#Art #Hate #People

Films that are entertainments give simple answers but I think that's ultimately more cynical, as it denies the viewer room to think. If there are more answers at the end, then surely it is a richer experience.
-- Michael Haneke

#Simple #Thinking #Giving

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Girl #Mother #Uniforms

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Violence #Directors #Film

My father and I had a good relationship, it was very relaxed. He had a lot of humour. He looked a little bit like me, although he had no beard. He had the appearance of a very elegant British-looking man.
-- Michael Haneke

#Father #Men #Good Relationship

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Television #Shooting #Crafts

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Art #Names #Television

It's unbearable when someone changes around you. Just imagine that your life partner changes, then it is difficult to cope with. Or your mother. Or your father. They were strong and now they're like a baby - it's not so funny.
-- Michael Haneke

#Mother #Baby #Strong

Because I'm the author of my screenplays I know what I'm looking for. It's true that I can be stubborn in demanding that I get what I want, but it's also a question of working with patience and love.
-- Michael Haneke

#Patience #Stubborn #Want

It's harder to write a story with just two people in a room than with 50 characters.
-- Michael Haneke

#Character #Writing #Two

Of course, we avoid death. To know something is inevitable is one thing. To accept, to truly feel it... that's different.
-- Michael Haneke

#Different #Accepting #Inevitable

I try to get closer to reality, to get close to the contradictions. The cinema world can be a real world rather than a dream world.
-- Michael Haneke

#Dream #Real #Trying

I consider all my films experiments.
-- Michael Haneke

#Film #Experiments

Usually music is used to hide a film's problems.
-- Michael Haneke

#Film #Problem #Used

At its best, film should be like a ski jump. It should give the viewer the option of taking flight, while the act of jumping is left up to him.
-- Michael Haneke

#Jumping #Giving #Flight

As a European filmmaker, you can not make a genre film seriously. You can only make a parody.
-- Michael Haneke

#Film #Genre #Parody

All movies assault the viewer in one way or another.
-- Michael Haneke

#Way #Assault

What I like are films that take me seriously, that don't treat me as more stupid than I am.
-- Michael Haneke

#Stupid #Film #Treats

And I don't believe that children are innocent. In fact, no one seriously believes that. Just go to a playground and watch the kids playing in the sandbox! The romantic notion of the sweet child is simply the parents projecting their own wishes.
-- Michael Haneke

#Sweet #Children #Believe

A feature film is twenty-four lies per second.
-- Michael Haneke

#Lying #Twenties #Four

There is just as much evil in all of us as there is good. We're all continuously guilty, even if we're not doing it intentionally to be evil. Here we are sitting in luxury hotels, living it up on the the backs of others in the third world. We all have a guilty conscience, but we do very little about it.
-- Michael Haneke

#Luxury #Evil #Sitting

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Awards #Important #Lasts

It's a disease of critics that once they've labeled someone, it's very hard to change their perspective. It's laziness.
-- Michael Haneke

#Perspective #Laziness #Disease

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Drama #Issues #Trying

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Thinking #Excellence #Demand

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#War #Goes On #Way

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Coffee #Simple #Long

To be perfectly honest, I think that as I'm growing older, I'm just growing more impatient. I'll be very happy if at some point people say, 'Michael's grown wiser and softer in his old age.' But we'll have to wait and see what my next project is.
-- Michael Haneke

#Thinking #People #Waiting

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Distance #Empowerment #Cinema

I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears with my work. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.
-- Michael Haneke

#Artist #Order #Neurosis

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#War #Trying #Different

Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.
-- Michael Haneke

#Lying #Film

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.
-- Michael Haneke

#Art #Want #Answers

A strict form such as mine cannot be achieved through improvisation.
-- Michael Haneke

#Form #Strict #Improvisation

Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it's healthy to return to classical forms.
-- Michael Haneke

#Thinking #Healthy #Return