If someone's lying to us, then it's rare that we know that they're lying to us. It's only in bad films that you recognize immediately that an actor's playing in such a way that you can see that he's lying, and that's simply dumb. But to reach that, it requires that you make a film in such a way that a spectator feels compelled to find his own explanation. You want to lead the spectator to find his own interpretation. To ask questions rather than provide all of the answers. Doing that leads to open endings and open dramaturgy.

Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable.

A feature film is twenty-four lies per second.

It became a gamble to myself whether I was able to do the exact same film ["Funny Games"]under very different circumstances.

Film is the manipulative medium par excellence. When you think back on the history of film and the 20th century, you see the propaganda that's been made. So there are moral demands on the director to treat the spectators as seriously as he or she takes himself and not to see them merely as victims that can be manipulated to whatever ends they have.

The dumber people are, the more they feel the need for a broad set of shoulders they can lay their head against.

There are really two types of laughter on the part of the spectator. There is the laughter of recognition - which means seeing things you're familiar with and laughing at yourself. But there's also hysterical laughter - a way of dealing with the things we see that upset us.