Top 70 Michael Haneke Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A feature film is twenty-four lies per second.”

— Michael Haneke

2. “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.”

— Michael Haneke

3. “An artist is someone who should raise questions rather than give answers. I have no message.”

— Michael Haneke

4. “It’s impossible to consider living without ideals. However, when ideas lead to ideology, that’s a very dangerous thing. Ideology then leads to creating the image of an enemy, and it leads to the murder and massacre that we’ve seen since the beginning of time.”

— Michael Haneke

5. “I want to make it clear: it’s not that I hate mainstream cinema. It’s perfectly fine. There are a lot of people who need to escape, because they are in very difficult situations, so they have the right to escape from the world. But this has nothing to do with an art form.”

— Michael Haneke

6. “On the set I make jokes I can’t get too involved, or it turns into sentimental soup. I try to keep it light.”

— Michael Haneke

7. “Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.”

— Michael Haneke

8. “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.”

— Michael Haneke

9. “I think watching a movie that simply confirms my feelings is a waste of time. That applies not only to movies, but also to books and every form of art.”

— Michael Haneke

10. “At its best, film should be like a ski jump. It should give the viewer the option of taking flight, while the act of jumping is left up to him.”

— Michael Haneke

11. “It’s unbearable when someone changes around you. Just imagine that your life partner changes, then it is difficult to cope with. Or your mother. Or your father. They were strong and now they’re like a baby – it’s not so funny.”

— Michael Haneke

Featured in: Strong Quotes

12. “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.”

— Michael Haneke

13. “Unfortunately, you’re helpless when people interpret your work wrongly. There are simply people who can’t or won’t understand or accept what you’re trying to do. When you take the risk of expressing yourself in public, you have to open yourself to that possibility.”

— Michael Haneke

14. “When making a film, I’m never concerned about whether the theme is new or whether it’s been done before in cinema or not. I’m led to make films if there’s a theme that interests me or I experience something in my own life that confronts me with something that I want to deal with.”

— Michael Haneke

15. “I consider all my films experiments.”

— Michael Haneke

16. “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.”

— Michael Haneke

17. “The difficulty, then, is 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.”

— Michael Haneke

18. “You become a film critic because you’re interested in film. I don’t know whether knowing so much about cinema leads you to make better films, but it certainly can’t hurt.”

— Michael Haneke

19. “Films that are entertainments give simple answers but I think that’s ultimately more cynical, as it denies the viewer room to think. If there are more answers at the end, then surely it is a richer experience.”

— Michael Haneke

20. “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.”

— Michael Haneke

21. “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.”

— Michael Haneke

22. “It’s the duty of art to ask questions, not to provide answers. And if you want a clearer answer, I’ll have to pass.”

— Michael Haneke

23. “In my film “Benny’s Video,” I depicted violence but I failed to say all that I had to say, so I wanted to continue the dialog and that’s why I did “Funny Games.” The irony is that after I shot “Funny Games,” but it hadn’t been released at all anywhere.”

— Michael Haneke

24. “Drama lives on conflict. If you’re trying to deal with social issues seriously, there’s no way of avoiding violence, which is so present in society.”

— Michael Haneke

25. “I give the spectator the possibility of participating. The audience completes the film by thinking about it; those who watch must not be just consumers ingesting spoon-fed images.”

— Michael Haneke

26. “I’m interested in seeing films that confront me with new things, with films that make me question myself, with films that help me to reflect on subjects that I hadn’t thought about before, films that help me progress and advance.”

— Michael Haneke

27. “Personally, I can’t stand violence. In any standard American mainstream movie, there’s 20 times more violence than in any one of my films, so I don’t know why those directors aren’t asked why they’re such specialists for violence.”

— Michael Haneke

28. “Awards are important for all directors because they improve your working conditions. You’re only as good as your last film, so if you get prizes or large audiences, then you get more money for your next film.”

— Michael Haneke

29. “Because in the feudal system of that period at least 80% of people lived in villages, so it’s very simple to get a cross-section of society in a single village. You get the microcosm of the social macrocosm.”

— Michael Haneke

30. “And I don’t believe that children are innocent. In fact, no one seriously believes that. Just go to a playground and watch the kids playing in the sandbox! The romantic notion of the sweet child is simply the parents projecting their own wishes.”

— Michael Haneke

31. “My mother as a young girl went out with a young SS officer and she didn’t really know what was going on – she just liked the uniform. When he told her about the things that he did, she was disgusted and broke up with him.”

— Michael Haneke

32. “I’m far more relaxed with German. I’m a control freak. I like to know exactly who’s saying and doing what.”

— Michael Haneke

33. “I think that religion is an integral part of human needs, but the question also is how you understand religion.”

— Michael Haneke

34. “Film is simply the most complex way you can express yourself.”

— Michael Haneke

35. “Even the most elitist director or author who claims that he doesn’t care if his works are seen or not, then I have to think that he’s either a liar or a hypocrite.”

— Michael Haneke

36. “What I like are films that take me seriously, that don’t treat me as more stupid than I am.”

— Michael Haneke

37. “I’m not someone who enjoys long talks, long rehearsals. I’m very technical: I tell my actors, you come in, you sit down, you pick up a coffee, you look here, you say the line. We try it with the cameras rolling, and if it doesn’t work, we adjust it until it does. It’s very simple.”

— Michael Haneke

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

— Michael Haneke

39. “I try to get closer to reality, to get close to the contradictions. The cinema world can be a real world rather than a dream world.”

— Michael Haneke

40. “Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it’s healthy to return to classical forms.”

— Michael Haneke

41. “Usually music is used to hide a film’s problems.”

— Michael Haneke

42. “What we’re doing for another person is more important than what we’re feeling for them.”

— Michael Haneke

43. “It is boring to have all the answers. Only political people have answers.”

— Michael Haneke

44. “It’s a fact that people who are in a weakened position, whether physically or mentally, have this perception of the outer world as threatening. Everything that is unexpected or unknown is seen as a potential danger.”

— Michael Haneke

45. “You’ll see more violence in any television crime series than you will in my films Art is there to have a stimulating effect, if it earns its name. You have to be honest, that’s the only thing.”

— Michael Haneke

46. “In German. I’m more sensitized to the details, to the emotions. In English, I wouldn’t detect as much nuance.”

— Michael Haneke

47. “People expect me to be dark and gloomy, then write that I’m a jolly chap, and after all, that is what I am. I think it’s a case of an absolute romantic naivety that there should be a parallel between the work and the artist.”

— Michael Haneke

48. “People have been educated to expect answers, even before the questions come along. It’s the TV principle. You offer three possible answers before the questions come to relax and calm the audience.”

— Michael Haneke

49. “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.”

— Michael Haneke

50. “As a private person, professionally I am invisible.”

— Michael Haneke