Michael Haneke Quotes

Film has to reflect the real world.

The director's task is to recreate life, its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of the truth he has seen, even if not everyone finds that truth acceptable.

I don't want to imitate life in movies; I want to represent it. And in that representation, you use the colors you feel, and sometimes they are fake colors. But always it's to show one emotion.

I've always wanted to do pieces that have an integral sense of realism and aren't just there for titillation.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

Photograph the world as it is. Nothing's more interesting than reality.

I think you have a pact with an audience in every picture, and I think the pact is to try and be truthful and to be real.

I try to find the picture, not create it.

Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.

Some music comes from a real place; some music comes from your imagination. It's difficult to find out what's real and what's not, especially with the gangster stuff.

I'm not very good at creating worlds. I prefer to write about the world as it is.

I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.

The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation.

What is called a sincere work is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

I've always been inspired by Genet, Henry Miller and Hubert Selby, Jr., who taught me that you've got to tell a bigger truth in whatever you're doing, but the truth is not popular.

In all my movies, be it 'Page 3', 'Chandni Bar' or 'Corporate,' I have tried to depict honesty and reality.

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

Although for some people cinema means something superficial and glamorous, it is something else. I think it is the mirror of the world.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

I'm not big into images. I'm into reality.

This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.

The drama is a great revealer of life.

Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.

Why do you think the fans like us - why they prefer our street raps over all that phony stuff out there? Because we're telling the real story of what it's like living in places like Compton. We're giving them reality. We're like reporters. We give them the truth.

The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.