Quotes By Michael Haneke

A feature film is twenty-four lies per second.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 serves audience expectations.

I think it's a little simplistic to explain a work through the psychology of its author. In other words, that Haneke has emotional problems, so I don't have to take his films seriously. By using this argument, the viewer retreats from the challenges of the film.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

'The White Ribbon' had to be in German because of the subject matter, that was clear. But in the case of 'Amour,' it could have taken place in any country.

I'm lucky enough to be able to make films and so I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears and all those things with my work. That's an enormous privilege. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.

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

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.

As a private person, professionally I am invisible.

'Funny Games' was conceived as a provocation. My other films are different. If people feel my other films are, or respond to them as provocation, then that's quite different. 'Funny Games' is the only one of mine where my intention was to provoke the audience.

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.

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.

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.

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.