If I tell the audience what they should think, then I am robbing them of their own imagination and their own capacity of deciding what's important to them.

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.

I'm not really a happy person. It's a question of temperament. I have a tendency toward melancholy. You can feel quite happily melancholic.

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

To me, it's far more efficient to mobilize the imagination. It's far more efficient to hear a creaking step, for example, than to see the face of a monster, which usually looks ridiculous, and where you know that the blood is ketchup.

If you go with the principle, you should go with the principle. If I really saw the subject very differently than ten years ago, I would have done a different movie.

Of course I am a child of European culture. There are a number of great directors from which I learned, but there is nobody in particular I got inspired from.