Michael Haneke Quotes

I have a lot of influences. I like to sit down with the cinematographer a month before, and we'll watch pieces of 20 or 30 movies. You're basically the sum of all the experiences you've ever had, and they're sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in the things you create, and that includes seeing movies.

It's so much work to make a movie, and for me it has to get me off my butt. To get me actually writing you have to strike something inside, you have to hit a power main to get the energy. You have to strike something you care about.

I have a few friends that have inspired me since I was a young kid. When I watch old films or modern movies - particularly 'Gladiator,' 'New Jack City' and 'The Skin I Live In' - I'll also get ideas.

The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement.

It's a funny thing with the inspiration thing. There's always loads of music around that I absolutely love and films going back to when I started making film music in the mid-80's.

Life experience makes the best music. That's the thing that nobody else can offer. Nobody else can offer my life. I have a life that is fit for movies, music, and so forth. Nobody else can give that.

I think your life informs your art.

I don't generally derive my stories from novels. I try to turn into film things I have felt or experienced.

Your life can become the background for the art you create.

The passion that transforms life, and art, did not seem to be mine.

When assignments were over, photography continued. One of the primary reasons it did was that I wanted and needed to have fresh work. Also, it's very stimulating to be around non-professional photographers. They're the ones with the purest flame burning about their photography. I appreciate that.

We didn't set out to make some polemic about life in the digital age, I can only react emotionally to story ideas. You hear an idea and you go, 'That's cool. I can see spending a few years of my life working on that.' As a filmmaker, you approach it like, 'OK. They're going to give you all this money to make this movie. It's like an electric train set you get to play with.'

I do sculpting sometimes when I have the time, and the first thing I sculpted was a bust of [Albert] Einstein. It still sits on my table and still inspires me. He was a person who triggered my imagination and my ideas.

I think a domestic situation can change you and your attitudes. I suppose if you did get a bit content, then you might not write savage lyrics.

I feel very fortunate to be currently in the position where I can choose to be an actor, writer, director, or all of them at the same time. With being a mom, I've recently had a priority shift that has sort of thrusted itself on my existence, but I tend to use all experiences as something to work with. Anything that is profoundly, energy shifting - like having a child - is fodder for creative thought.

The fabric of my life is under my skin; [but] it's definitely not something that comes up in a conscious way when I read material. I have an incredible relationship with my mom, so I'm fascinated by mothers who do not have that. But I've never done anything that resembled my life. People always jump to that conclusion, and I wish life were that simple, but it's not.

I just wanted to be a good comic and had no sense of show business, but at some point you want the opportunity to write a show about your life.

We just did a bunch of songs, and there was a lot of enthusiasm for the songs that we made. We didn't feel like we had to do Miike Snow. We just did it because, I mean, I guess we felt like it would be a bit of a shame to leave it where we left it.

I've always wanted to direct and as I grow and I get older and I get older I just want to let that evolve.

Only about one per cent of my paintings show family members. Do they help me deal with problems? It's likely that these problems can only be depicted. But photographs, private ones and others, keep appearing that fascinate me so much that I want to paint them. And sometimes the real meaning these images have for me only becomes apparent later.

Movies bore me; especially my own.

…[Thomas Wolfe] says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, uh, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can’t avoid that.

If there's a criteria that really gets me interested in a work besides any type of personal interaction with the theme, it's if I feel like this is the right piece of work for that director at that moment in their career.

I make music as good as possible, but I do reference cultural icons, because I want my music to be a time capsule of 2007.

I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes. I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.