When making a film, I'm never concerned about whether the theme is new or whether it's been done before in cinema or not. I'm led to make films if there's a theme that interests me or I experience something in my own life that confronts me with something that I want to deal with.

You become a film critic because you're interested in film. I don't know whether knowing so much about cinema leads you to make better films, but it certainly can't hurt.

There is just as much evil in all of us as there is good. We're all continuously guilty, even if we're not doing it intentionally to be evil. Here we are sitting in luxury hotels, living it up on the the backs of others in the third world. We all have a guilty conscience, but we do very little about it.

I consider all my films an experiment, at least in my mind.

Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it's healthy to return to classical forms.

Usually, when making a film, the surprises are negative surprises. You don't get what you wanted or what you hoped for. The only nice surprises are those that are offered to you by actors when they offer you these gifts, when they are better and give you more than what you had originally conceived. That doesn't happen every day on set, but if it happens a couple of times in the course of making a film, you can consider yourself very lucky.

In German. I'm more sensitized to the details, to the emotions. In English, I wouldn't detect as much nuance.