The trouble is that when you read criticisms about the other films that I've made you get the impression that they're all about themes, or problems, or ideas. But those are actually things that develop out of characters, out of images and out of other things. These more abstract things develop while working on the material, and out of it. It's not a theoretical exercise from the outset.

You cannot hurt animals, so what do I do? I kill the dog first. Then I do it with the boy. You're not supposed to break the illusion of this being a film, so I make the actor talk to the audience. Provocation is the principle of the whole film [ Funny Games]. It is very ironic.

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.

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

If you do an original film and you want to cut a scene out you do it. But when you do a shot by shot remake you don't have that option and every scene has to work again.

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.