Director

I can't prevent myself of being funny.

I get very, very bored by TV series or TV movies. But when you see great acrobats on TV, my eyes stick to the screen. I can watch them forever.

Before being a person, man is an animal, with all its reptilian compulsions. And if at some point you block the conscious part of the mind, you've got all the reptilian compulsions that come out.

I'm so used to bad reviews. I really enjoy them when they're very mean!

I got used to long takes with 'Irreversible' and 'Enter the Void' and also with 'Love.'

I don't believe in telling people you can suffer this life because you're rewarded in a future life.

The truth is, when you make movies, you have to learn how to lie. You have to convince people to give you money and you pretend they'll get double, triple or 10 times as much.

I'm not interested in constraining human beings like rats in a laboratory.

I'm a happy person. When a happy person makes a cruel movie, it becomes funny.

Sometimes when I make a movie, my main goal is to show the movie to one particular director.

Yeah, I was only in New York from the age of six months until five years old. But my very first memories are all of New York. I remember my first rainbow on a beach in New York. I remember jumping on a bed in New York.

Lars von Trier makes funny, radical movies, some packing power. But, he's not a provocateur. He's making adult movies for an adult audience. Pasolini, too. Fassbinder, too.

Documentaries can provoke much more than narrative movies.

I still can't get used to a smartphone. There's something I really dislike about it, but for a new generation, life without smartphones never existed.

Every single life is about construction and destruction.

Sometimes you don't want to abandon a project to go to another move and come back, so maybe because I have a manic obsession I stick to my idea, and I'd rather wait than do something that is not my main passion.

If I cared about who was winning the Oscar, it was when I was a kid when they were giving awards to 'Midnight Cowboy' or 'The Godfather.'

When I go to the DVD shop, I mostly buy documentaries because you learn a lot from documentaries.

I think that in some ways 'Climax' is easier to digest than my other movies because the characters are easier to identify with. You love them because they're young, they're great dancers, they're beautiful, and they are willing to construct something. They're not losers like most of the characters of my previous movies.

Seventies cinema - 'Taxi Driver,' 'Deliverance' - that was the best period of American cinema.