Quotable Haneke

I often compare filmmaking with building a ski jump; the actual jumping should be done by the audience. For the filmmaker, this is pretty hard—it’s much easier to do the jump yourself, to do it for the viewer. Because there’s always the fear of frustrating them. What do I have to indicate? What do I leave out? How much can I not spell out when constructing a film and still not frustrate the audience? Such strategies have become widely accepted in modern literature, but much less so in cinema. That’s a bit sad.

. . . .

As Brecht put it, “simplicity is the hardest thing to achieve.” Everyone dreams of doing things simply and still impregnating them with the fullness of the world. Only the best ones achieve this. Kiarostami has, and so has Bresson. But I must say that I see too few new films; I used to see more, but now I mostly watch older things, at home. I feel more enriched when re-watching Dreyer or other classics. They tell me more about the world of today than today’s films!

Michael Haneke, from an interview in Film Comment (November/December 2009)

And I agree completely with those sentiments.