You can change so many things in your life, but you cannot change where you come from. It's something that you have to deal with: the role everybody plays in his family, no matter if he likes it or not.

You can change so many things in your life, but you cannot change where you come from. It's something that you have to deal with: the role everybody plays in his family, no matter if he likes it or not.

I had the feeling I had to stay focused on what's lying under. A big part of the story in Toni Erdmann happens on the sub-level. On the surface, a lot of scenes, it's banal. If the actor starts thinking, "Oh, I'm in a genre, I'm doing a comedy, I'm doing funny things," then you lose.

Politically, the world economy really depends on consultants. Because it's also, in a way, an outsourcing of responsibility. They can say, "Yeah, they told us to do that," and the consultant says, "Yeah, but I'm just a consultant," and nobody's responsible anymore.

When you direct the dialogue you can be precise, but with a song as a director you're more like a football coach. You can say one, two things in the beginning and then the actor has to follow what happens.

Father-daughter has a lot of layers, I find.

We with Komplizen Film believe very much in the writer-director and in the freedom of a filmmaker. I think it's always good to be involved where you spend the money. Filmmaking, you see in the picture what the money's spent for. I never had to leave a phase of filmmaking before being really happy, and that was really a big luxury. That could happen, I think, because I am my own producer.