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

Michael Haneke Quotes

I want to be able to control things and that’s very difficult to do if you’re not 100% in a particular language. It makes you uncertain and it makes you nervous.

— Michael Haneke

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

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

I think that religion is an integral part of human needs, but the question also is how you understand religion.

— Michael Haneke

Like every filmmaker, I make my films to reach the widest audience possible.

— Michael Haneke

I never use soundtrack; it is always part of the story.

— Michael Haneke

About Stories

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

In German. I’m more sensitized to the details, to the emotions. In English, I wouldn’t detect as much nuance.

— Michael Haneke

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

If you do an original film and you want to cut a scene out you do it. But when you do a shot by shot remake you don’t have that option and every scene has to work again.

— Michael Haneke

If you go with the principle, you should go with the principle. If I really saw the subject very differently than ten years ago, I would have done a different movie.

— Michael Haneke

The difficulty, then, is 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

It could be Fascist, religious or political – it’s always the same model that operates in these circumstances, and it’s that which is the actuality of this film. Therefore, it’s not specifically an explanation of German Fascism because that would be an impossible thing to do in any case.

— Michael Haneke

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

I like to write for actors I know and with whom I’ve worked before. You can write to their strengths and weaknesses and write roles that are better suited to them.

— Michael Haneke

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

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

I’m interested in seeing films that confront me with new things, with films that make me question myself, with films that help me to reflect on subjects that I hadn’t thought about before, films that help me progress and advance.

— Michael Haneke

I think watching a movie that simply confirms my feelings is a waste of time. That applies not only to movies, but also to books and every form of art.

— Michael Haneke

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

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