Michael Haneke Quotations | Page 2

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.

Unfortunately, you're helpless when people interpret your work wrongly. There are simply people who can't or won't understand or accept what you're trying to do. When you take the risk of expressing yourself in public, you have to open yourself to that possibility.

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

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.

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.

Film is simply the most complex way you can express yourself

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.

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.