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I consider all my films an experiment, at least in my mind.

Michael Haneke

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Michael Haneke
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 23
Film Actor
Film Critic
Film Director
Screenwriter
Theatrical Director
University Teacher
Writer
München
Least
Film
Mind
Experiment
Experiments
Consider
Films

More quotes by Michael Haneke

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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
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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
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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.
Michael Haneke
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Never say no. It always depends on what's possible. I don't care so much where it is it's what I want to do that matters.
Michael Haneke
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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. So my approach with the narrator is to question that, to leave that open, to underline the fact that this is uncertain.
Michael Haneke
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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.
Michael Haneke
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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
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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
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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
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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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I always seek to mobilize, to call on the imagination of the spectator. It's well-known that the images that are created by one's imagination are far stronger than any that I can show. In fact, it's an error, a widespread error in mainstream cinema, to always want to show things and to depict things.
Michael Haneke
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What we're doing for another person is more important than what we're feeling for them.
Michael Haneke
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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
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In German. I'm more sensitized to the details, to the emotions. In English, I wouldn't detect as much nuance.
Michael Haneke
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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.
Michael Haneke
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It became a gamble to myself whether I was able to do the exact same film [Funny Games]under very different circumstances.
Michael Haneke
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The dumber people are, the more they feel the need for a broad set of shoulders they can lay their head against.
Michael Haneke
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You become a film critic because you're interested in film. I don't know whether knowing so much about cinema leads you to make better films, but it certainly can't hurt.
Michael Haneke
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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
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A strict form such as mine cannot be achieved through improvisation.
Michael Haneke