Michael Haneke
Quotations
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“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
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“I love actors, both my parents were actors, and the work with actors is the most enjoyable part of making a film. It’s important that they feel protected and are confident they won’t be betrayed. When you create that atmosphere of trust, it’s in the bag – the actors will do everything to satisfy you.”…
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“All movies assault the viewer in one way or another.” -Michael Haneke
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“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
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“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…
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“When I first envisioned ‘Funny Games’ in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivety, the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films, violence is made consumable.” -Michael Haneke
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“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
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“You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art, we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich, when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war, literature was careful not to do the same, which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they…
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“Of course, we avoid death. To know something is inevitable is one thing. To accept, to truly feel it… that’s different.” -Michael Haneke
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“Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it…
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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
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