"Consider the pigeon just a pigeon...There are lots of pigeons in Paris."

"I know very well the sorts of pressures you're under in television. I don't work in television anymore myself, but I'…"

"Film is an artificial construct. It pretends to reconstruct reality. But it doesn't do that—it's a manipulative…"

"All of my films constitute a reaction against mainstream cinema. Every serious form of art sees the receiver as a par…"

"Today's conventional cinema, or mass cinema, doesn't take the receiver seriously as a partner. It sees the audience m…"

"My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of th…"

"Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral…"

"My favourite film-maker of the decade is Abbas Kiarostami. He achieves a simplicity that's so difficult to attain."

"I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it's totally normal to not …"

"Natürlich ist es notwendig, über Gewalt zu sprechen. Aber audiovisuelle Medien leben von Bewegung und Attraktion. Gew…"