As a European filmmaker, you can not make a genre film seriously. You can only make a parody.

I want to make it clear: it's not that I hate mainstream cinema. It's perfectly fine. There are a lot of people who need to escape, because they are in very difficult situations, so they have the right to escape from the world. But this has nothing to do with an art form.

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

I consider all my films experiments.

Of course, we avoid death. To know something is inevitable is one thing. To accept, to truly feel it... that's different.

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.

I think that religion is an integral part of human needs, but the question also is how you understand religion.