I wanted to write and then I saw Pierrot and I understand that I could express myself in a more... Also probably, I had an intuition that if I was going to only write, I will stay in one room all the time and never go out. I felt that if I was going to make movies, I would have to communicate with people and it would be good for me.

What I hate in movies is all those people you need. And then I realize I do better when I shoot by myself.

When I'm in my neighborhood, I don't see anything anymore, because I'm so used to it. When I go somewhere else, suddenly, I'm alive. I'm on alert, and I can be fresh.

I had an awful joke about Auschwitz I drove everybody crazy with that joke. But that joke makes me feel good. You know what "cuit" means? When something is cooked. It's a joke like that: "What are the birds doing when they fly over Auschwitz? 'Cuit! Cuit!'" It's awful, but it's desacralizing. For me, it's good.

First I went to a Jewish school, when I was very little. But when I was 12, they put me in a school with a lot of traditions, and they were educated people and they were talking about Greece and the Parthenon and I don't know what. All the kids, all the girls they had already seen that and knew that from their family, and I would say, "What are you talking about, what's that?" It's not my world. My grandparents were very well-educated people, but in the Jewish tradition. They knew everything about the Bible.

I'm Jewish. That's all. So I am in exile all the time. Wherever we go, we are in exile. Even in Israel, we are in exile.

Lars von Trier is very, very, very clever about women. He gives the woman a space that I don't know any filmmaker does. Because in Breaking The Waves, protagonist Emily Watson is the Christ. Which man is doing that? I don't know any man giving that space to a woman. No one.