It's a disease of critics that once they've labeled someone, it's very hard to change their perspective. It's laziness.

Mainstream cinema raises questions only to immediately provide an answer to them, so they can send the spectator home reassured. If we actually had those answers, then society would appear very different from what it is.

The difficulty, then, is when you create a church, an institution, and you create a dogma. When you create an ideology, that's the danger. Communism, too, is a beautiful idea, but millions of people died when communism became an ideology.

At its best, film should be like a ski jump. It should give the viewer the option of taking flight, while the act of jumping is left up to him.

Because I'm the author of my screenplays I know what I'm looking for. It's true that I can be stubborn in demanding that I get what I want, but it's also a question of working with patience and love.

I make my films because I'm affected by a situation, by something that makes me want to reflect on it, that lends itself to an artistic reflection. I always aim to look directly at what I'm dealing with. I think it's a task of dramatic art to confront us with things that in the entertainment industry are usually swept under the rug.

For me, it's always difficult when a historical film claims to depict or represent a reality that none of us can know, that is always different. It's always the case. We never know what happened then.