The main thing as a director, you always want to have a bit of a worry about the material you're going to get yourself into. You want to be a bit scared of it so that you have that excitement of having to climb the mountain.
— Susanne Bier
None of my movies are autobiographical.
We always want to find good and bad guys, and I don't believe in that.
As a filmmaker, I always try not to concern myself with the outcome of things. I make the movie, and I do that as honestly and good as I can. I don't want to pollute my thoughts with what is going to happen with it afterwards, because I have to work inside-out.
If you look at children's stories in fairy tales, they're pretty brutal.
I don't feel that I'm strictly Danish; I don't feel that my sense of humor is strictly Danish or my human sensibility is strictly Danish.
I think the good thing about Dogme is that it forces you into an extreme sense of reality because there's no artificial light and no set design and all of those icings on the cake that you usually have on a movie.
I think most of my films all have a certain tone or intensity in them. They are tense, and you kind of anticipate some kind of catastrophe, but you're not quite sure.
Having done a Dogme film taught me the beauty of simplicity and austerity.
If I go home from a day of shooting, and I haven't at some point felt the magic, I'm really frustrated.
For the Oscars, I had a speech in my hand, and I just knew if I opened the piece of paper, I was going to be unable to read it. So I just thought, 'I'm going to say, as coherently as I can, whatever I can.'
There were 10 or 15 years where all the Scandinavian movies were gray and light brown. I got really bored with it. I really felt that movies had to have that life of vivid colors.
For years, whenever I'd been travelling and came back to Copenhagen, I'd think: 'People are so stylish.' And it's not any one class. It's everyday life.
A significant number of women who have been ill or had marital issues feel they have no value, and society is so keen on telling us that's the case.
Women, nowhere in the world, have the kind of important position in society in the amount that they ought to have.
I've had a very fortunate, very privileged life. I say it with all humility because it could change tomorrow.
I guess I strongly feel that we cannot pretend that the Third World is not part of our world. We cannot say 'OK, there's that problem over there, let's just close our eyes' - we cannot do that.
I did learn a lot from 'Things We Lost in the Fire,' but I've learned different things from different films.
I think it's extremely difficult consistently being a decent human being.
If my daughter's going to go out in the winter with summer clothes, I'm gonna question it. And at some point, I assume, if the conversation goes on long enough, if I can convince her, she will put on some warm clothes. And I think that sort of exchange is pretty valid.
I never have particular actors planned when I'm in the process of writing.
You don't have to go very far away from Scandinavia to realize what an idyllic society it is.
I have a slight controversy with the Dogme brethren because I've been saying that rules are to be interpreted; not that I haven't followed the rules, because I don't see the point of submitting yourself to a set of rules if you don't follow them. But having said that, it is always a lot of interpretation.
People don't necessarily do evil deeds because they want to; people happen to do something with horrible consequences even if they meant to be kind.
I would say I'm basically interested in human beings, and I don't really care whether they're men or women. I think my comprehension is about the same for both.
I've always been slightly hesitant about generalizing movies made by men and women being different in their nature; I think movies by each director are different. Having said that, I think that it's kind of disgraceful that there aren't more female directors.
I have this almost obsessive desire to whomever is close to me: I want to have a very intense, close, intimate relationship with them.
I believe in rules. I believe in artistic limitations, and I always have. I've always thought that setting out a set of rules before you start, and then being completely consistent with them, is the only way to make a really good film.
I don't feel I have an issue with listening or understanding English in any sort of way.
I am very close to my family, and there's something life-affirming about that. Even if you feel completely different from them and have totally different views on politics and ethics, you're still family and have that immediate acceptance.
At some stage in most people's lives, things turn upside down, and nothing is as you expected it to be.
I think the lack of automatically feeling, 'Yes, the future is going to be like the present' - that is very much a Jewish thing.
I've got this fear of becoming comfortable.
Oftentimes, reality is much worse than what you can put in a movie.
There are certain things you cannot accept. There are certain things that human beings cannot tolerate.
Dogme is like leading a religious life, in that you are freeing yourself from making certain choices. It makes life easier.
I see myself as a storyteller.
In a way, our family is our modern identity.
Denmark is like a big family of people.
I don't want actors to be writers. I think it's too much responsibility.
Parents can shape a child, but a great teacher can, too.
I really don't like that modern notion of 'I don't need anyone.' I see a lot of young women feeling they have to be that way, they have to be hard, in a way. And what does that bring them? They're just going to be lonesome. They're going to be, at best, lonesome and capable, at worst, lonesome and hard. And is that what we want? No.
My favorite hobby is matchmaking. It's a lot easier to do it in movies then in real life because in real life, people don't do what I tell them to do.
Any creative process is about being in a territory which isn't secure, isn't necessarily familiar, and isn't convenient in any sort of way. And that's the excitement of it.
I hate when the sun is high and there are no shadows. If I could do super high-budget movies, I would only shoot when the sun starts to get low - but you can't just shoot for four hours every day.
In a way, the whole notion of a blueprint of a building is not that different from a script for a movie. A sequence of spaces, which is what you do as an architect, is really the same as a sequence of scenes.
I'm a huge fan of Richard Curtis - there's real grief, real compassion in his films as well as cheekiness; it's a wonderful cocktail.
The foundations of our lives are far more fragile than we think. So we are severely shaken when life turns out to have a will of its own.
I think that being Jewish has generated an extremely strong sense of the importance of family. If I look at my Scandinavian colleagues, they don't have that urgency about family. All my movies are about that.
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