Over the course of extensive conversations with French film critics Michel Cieutat and Philippe Rouyer, Austrian director Michael Haneke reflects on his five decades of work across film, theatre and television. Avoiding interpretation and resisting moral conclusions, Haneke instead offers a precise and revealing account of his creative practice: from the structure of his screenplays to the staging of actors, from production histories to his collaborations with cinematographers and editors. Discussing key works such as The Seventh Continent, Funny Games and its American remake, Caché, The White Ribbon and Amour, Haneke sheds light on the formal and ethical concerns that underpin his cinema. The result is a free-flowing, candid and rigorous self-portrait of an artist for whom form is never neutral, and whose films challenge viewers not through answers, but through the careful withholding of them. Haneke on Haneke traces his development from early years in radio and theatre to the international recognition of his later work, offering essential insight into one of contemporary cinema’s most austere and exacting voices. It offers a rare opportunity to observe, up close, the working methods of a director whose austere, unflinching vision has profoundly shaped the landscape of contemporary European cinema.
Translated from French by Paul Cronin.
