Quotes

I have nothing to do with the filming community in Budapest. They don't like me, because I don't make conventional films. I can't talk with them about films, because I live and think differently than them. They are film makers and I am not. I don't know what I am.

[on why he likes long takes]: You know I like the continuity, because you have a special tension. Everybody is much more concentrated than when you have these short takes. And I like very much to build things, to conceive the scenes, how we can turn around somebody, you know, all the movements implied in these shots. It's like a play, and how we can tell something, tell something about life...Because it's very important to make the film a real psychological process.

If you are a real filmmaker you have to have your own style, your own language. Which is depending on your cultural background, your history, and your budget of course, and a lot of things what you already have. Because as I see, what I think, filmmaking is a kind of reaction to the world-you're just telling people how you see the world, from your point of view of course. But, you know, that's the reason why I do not listen for the other circumstances, what the other people are doing-because it's impossible to follow someone, impossible to say OK this is a trend, or what we would like to keep it or-it's definitely fake, wrong way. You have to be yourself, you have to tell everything from your side and you do have to have your own language; and if you have your own language you don't care about the world and anything really and that's what I feel, what I learned during these 34 years.

Without light in the darkness you cannot make movies.

I don't care about stories. I never did. Every story is the same. We have no new stories. We're just repeating the same ones. I really don't think, when you do a movie that you have to think about the story. The film isn't the story. It's mostly picture, sound, a lot of emotions. The stories are just covering something.

[on why he retired] A filmmaker is a nice bourgeois job. But I really don't want to do it. I'm not a real filmmaker. I've always been in it for the people and just wanted to say something about their lives. During these 34 years of filmmaking, I've said everything I want to say. I can repeat it, I can do a hundred things, but I really don't want to bore you. I really don't want to copy my films. That's all.

[on The Turin Horse (2011)] You are doing always the same thing every day, but every day is a little bit different, and the life is just getting weaker and weaker, and, by the end, disappears. This is what this movie shows you.

[on evolution of his style] At the beginning of my career, I had a lot of social anger. I just wanted to tell you how fu..ed up the society is. This was the beginning. Afterwards, I began to understand that the problems were not only social; they are deeper. I thought they were only ontological. It's so, so complicated, and when I understood more and more, when I went closer to the people... afterward, I could understand that the problems were not only ontological. They were cosmic. The whole fu..ed up world is over. That's what I had to understand, and that's why the style has moved. Once I went down, I kept going down. The style became more and more downward, by the end, becoming more simple, very pure. That's what was interesting for me, to discover something step by step.