I am crazy about time cuts. I have a theory that the audience tie everything together so they don't see time cuts but the time cuts give us the possibility of jumping in time, which means a psychological evolution can be cut down.

It's always been a lie that it's difficult to make films.

I am crazy about my own films. The films I've just made I'm crazy about them. But then I don't see them for many years. It's like when you get a new child you're very crazy about this child but then after a few years you're like, "what was its name again?"

I'm not a woman! Let's make that very clear! Oh I don't know, maybe I am. I am an American woman. Or 65 percent of me is.

It’s the opening of Manderlay in Cannes, and I’m sitting next to this guy who’s writing for a tiny fictitious French paper called ‘On the Sunny Side,’ and he’s writing a review on the film, and he’s obviously bored. Then he tells me about all the cars he owns, and how rich he is, and all these things... So, at a certain point, he says, "So what do you do?" Then I take out this very strange hammer we have in the Danish building business, and I say, "I kill." And then I kill him. It is as stupid as it sounds.

You could say that when you introduce humour to your work, you also step back a little from it. You create a distance

If people do not laugh it's not comedy.