1.
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
2.
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
3.
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
4.
Film is simply the most complex way you can express yourself
Michael Haneke
5.
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
6.
An artist is someone who should raise questions rather than give answers. I have no message.
Michael Haneke
7.
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
8.
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
9.
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
10.
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
11.
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
12.
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
13.
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
14.
Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.
Michael Haneke
15.
The film [the white Ribbon] does try to use German Fascism as an example, but not specifically Fascism... the results of German Fascism. It shows how people are prepared or indoctrinated for an ideology... people who are already in a state of repression who have been humiliated by society and who clasp at a straw that's offered to them. And how that's then developed into a form of indoctrination.
Michael Haneke
16.
If a director says he doesn't care how many people see his films at all, I simply don't believe him. Otherwise why would he bother to make the film? The only explanation would be that it would be an act of masturbation. I think that every creator is looking for a receptor. He's looking for an audience. There are two parts of the equation: a creator and, necessarily, the receiver of the work. It's the same thing for a painter who wants his paintings to be seen.
Michael Haneke
17.
If someone's lying to us, then it's rare that we know that they're lying to us. It's only in bad films that you recognize immediately that an actor's playing in such a way that you can see that he's lying, and that's simply dumb. But to reach that, it requires that you make a film in such a way that a spectator feels compelled to find his own explanation. You want to lead the spectator to find his own interpretation. To ask questions rather than provide all of the answers. Doing that leads to open endings and open dramaturgy.
Michael Haneke
18.
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
19.
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
20.
Usually music is used to hide a film's problems.
Michael Haneke
21.
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
22.
If I'm reading a book that doesn't leave me with questions, moving questions, that I feel confronted with, then for me it's a waste of time. I don't want to read a book that simply confirms what I already know.
Michael Haneke
23.
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
24.
My feeling, however, is that films that are open are more productive for the audience. The films that, if I'm in a cinema, and I'm watching a movie that answers all the questions that it raises, it's a film that bores me. In the same way, if I'm reading a book that doesn't leave me with questions, moving questions, that I feel confronted with, then for me it's a waste of time. I don't want to read a book that simply confirms what I already know.
Michael Haneke
25.
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
26.
To decide to film a movie again shot by shot, you must be masochistic to a certain degree because it is a much greater challenge.
Michael Haneke
27.
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
28.
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
29.
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
30.
I consider all my films experiments.
Michael Haneke
31.
That is one of the characteristics of fascism, the idea that the state can provide all of the answers for everyone.
Michael Haneke
32.
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
33.
A feature film is twenty-four lies per second.
Michael Haneke
34.
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
35.
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
36.
I never use soundtrack; it is always part of the story.
Michael Haneke
37.
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
38.
As a European filmmaker, you can not make a genre film seriously. You can only make a parody.
Michael Haneke
39.
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
40.
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
41.
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
42.
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.
Michael Haneke
43.
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
44.
What I like are films that take me seriously, that don't treat me as more stupid than I am.
Michael Haneke
45.
In my film "Benny's Video," I depicted violence but I failed to say all that I had to say, so I wanted to continue the dialog and that's why I did "Funny Games." The irony is that after I shot "Funny Games," but it hadn't been released at all anywhere.
Michael Haneke
46.
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
47.
Like every filmmaker, I make my films to reach the widest audience possible.
Michael Haneke
48.
Of course I am a child of European culture. There are a number of great directors from which I learned, but there is nobody in particular I got inspired from.
Michael Haneke
49.
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
50.
You cannot hurt animals, so what do I do? I kill the dog first. Then I do it with the boy. You're not supposed to break the illusion of this being a film, so I make the actor talk to the audience. Provocation is the principle of the whole film [ Funny Games]. It is very ironic.
Michael Haneke