Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.
You have to think with the heart.
In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.
At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power.
These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition.
So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.