I like it when actors depart from the script to find their characters.

Fiction is my home, I came from fiction, I like to tell stories.

As a director, you can transform your vision more with the music.

Whenever I'm making a feature film, I wish I were filming a documentary, because making feature films is so stressful. It happens every time.

I shot many scenes of Hamburg, albums full of postcard motifs, and I discarded almost all of them. I ride my bike through Hamburg every day. I go shopping here, I go to the doctor - and yet I no longer have the eye for telling stories about this damn city, even though I love it.

Germans try to categorize films: in a comedy, you just laugh and in a drama, you're not allowed to laugh. I don't believe in that, sometimes we laugh and cry in the same hour.

Film is a two dimensional thing - it goes up and down and left to right but if you put that music into that two dimensional medium, it became like a third, fourth, and fifth dimension, I really believe in that.