Michael Haneke
Michael Haneke
Michael Hanekeis an Austrian film director and screenwriter best known for films such as Funny Games, Caché, The White Ribbonand Amour. His work often examines social issues, and depicts the feelings of estrangement experienced by individuals in modern society. Haneke has worked in television‚ theatre and cinema. Besides working as a filmmaker, Haneke also teaches film direction at the Film Academy Vienna...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth23 March 1942
CityMunich, Germany
CountryUnited States of America
Usually music is used to hide a film's problems.
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.
An artist is someone who should raise questions rather than give answers. I have no message.
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.
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.