Film director

"The foreign directors are always fumbling about in obscurity, and the critics are always writing about the juxtaposition of black and white and the existential dilemma and all that shit, to disguise the fact that they dont understand the first damn thing about it either."

"I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach."

"In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life."

"Men are now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials — which, if one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence résumé of the future of American motion pictures."

"We are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You dont have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if youre offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship... Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as entertainment, its worth some anxiety. … How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?"

"I was talking to a friend about it recently and I told him that the thing about making that film that upset me most was how cruel Lars is to the woman he is working with. Not that I cant take it, because Im pretty tough and completely capable of defending myself, but because my ideals of the ultimate creator were shattered. And my friend said "What did you expect? All major directors are "sexist", a maker is not necessarily an expert in human rights or female/male equality! My answer was that you can take quite sexist film directors like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick and still they are the one that provide the soul to their movies. In Lars von Triers case it is not so and he knows it. He needs a female to provide his work soul. And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming. And hide the evidence. What saves him as an artist, though, is that he is so painfully honest that even though he will manage to cover up his crime in the "real" world (he is a genius to set things up that everybody thinks it is just his female-actress-at-the-moment imagination, that she is just hysterical or pre-menstrual), his films become a documentation of this "soul-robbery". Breaking the Waves is the clearest example of that."

"Im stubborn and creative. Anybody who works in an artistic medium trying to create something does not like people looking over their shoulder going, No no no, make it blue! Make it green! If you have a vision, you dont want a lot of outside influence. A director makes 100 decisions an hour. Students ask me how you know how to make the right decision, and I say to them, If you dont know how to make the right decision, youre not a director. Thats all there is to it. If you have to think about it, you cant direct something. There are directors out there who dont know how to make up their minds, but a true director has an idea in his head and can instantly weigh any decision against that and say, Thats right, thats wrong. You welcome feedback from talented people, not marketing people or executives who arent creative"

"[As the clones fight the droids]"

"Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages [[directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction."