Haneke Quotes

About `Funny Games`, and Austrian director Michael Haneke: I didn`t want to do it. The film was fascinating, but for an actress, it`s just incredibly hard to play. I regretted my decision later because it`s a really great film. But at the time, I just didn`t have the courage to play in it. Later, he offered me a role in The Piano Teacher, partly, I suspect, as a challenge; he said to me: `You`ll see - it`s worse than Funny Games !` I read the script and I thought it wasn`t worse at all. But the scenario was in English, and perhaps there were some scenes I didn`t really read properly.

A great film is always a metaphor for the direction. A great director always says what he thinks of the cinema through his work, through a fictional story. It is always a reflection of what it is to be a director, what is a movie, what is an audience. It`s always the same case. In the case of La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher), Michael Haneke talks about control and loss of control, and he was filming a woman who I felt was more identified with the situation of the director. This is a woman who controls her desire, exactly as a director controls his own desire and the audience`s desire. In the film, the woman is not the object of desire, she is the one who wants to control her desire. That is why as a film - I`m not even talking about the story - as a film it is interesting because he has changed the status of an actress in a film. That is why the sexual scenes were easier for me to do because I am not set up in the usual situation of being an object of a man`s desire, I am the one who controls the desire of the man. So I felt completely protected by this change of focus.

Even for the most difficult scenes, and there are difficult scenes in the film, and because Michael Haneke is such a great film-maker - I think a great film-maker is not only being inspired, but how to do it, how to make it as real as possible, knowing that it`s not real.