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THE SEVENTH CONTINENT

INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL HANEKE BY SERGE TOUBIANA

With this topic of The Seventh Continent...

at the time, I often wrote my films abroad,

on a Greek island,

and I went there as well,

and I tried to tell this story without giving any answers.

I wanted to tell the facts of the story when he commits suicide,

with flashbacks on his life.

I worked on it for six weeks, and I couldn't do it.

Because each flashback was an explanation.

And at a certain point, I realized that you can't tell it like this

if you want to keep the frightful secret.

And I decided to use a kind of protocol:

three years, one day.

We see what happens.

And it's up to the viewer to find his own answers.

And I think from that point on,

it was very easy to write the script.

It went very fast. It was done in four weeks.

I was very happy,

and the television station was very unhappy.

That's it.

That's the way it happened.

Through the difficulties I had telling this story,

which was a story I read in the paper

where, of course,

the journalist explained everything.

He did some research, he said:

"He had some debts. He couldn't pay. He had sexual problems with his wife."

All these silly explanations

that diminished--

-The strength of the gesture. -Yes.

And at the beginning, I didn't know how to tell it traditionally.

And this idea to use a very simple protocol

became my way to approach my topic.

We did some research

on young people's aptitude for deciphering edited images.

It's true that five-year-old children

are more able to assimilate information from fast edited images

than someone from another generation.

But on the other hand,

we also found that their impressions

are weaker emotionally.

They can decipher it, "Yes, this means that."

But the depth that's behind it is lost.

For that reason--

Well, not only for that reason,

but I think it's also a kind of protest against this manner

of giving pseudo information very quickly.

Because we know it all. Everything that's shown, we know.

If you tell a story on any topic,

we've already read a similar one.

How can you make a deeper impact on the viewer?

One of the possibilities is the pacing.

In general, film is a matter of pacing.

For me, film is much closer to music than to literature.

For the first several minutes,

you see only pieces

that show, in our day-to-day lives,

how much we're dominated

by the obligation to do daily tasks.

They don't live. They do things.

They go through the motions.

We're enslaved to these gestures.

Our whole life is the sum total of these gestures.

It's what remains the most.

And perhaps it's also the reason they do what they do in the film.

They destroy their possessions and everything that's theirs

with the same intensity, the same methodicalness.

They devote themselves completely to it.

And it could be an act of liberation.

But the way they do it

shows that it's not a liberation for them.

And for me, that's the saddest thing in the film.

We could have made the entire film starting from the halfway point,

from that decision to leave.

We could have made a provocative film

as a liberation.

But in my view, that would be a lie.

No!

-This violence is against themselves. -Yes, of course.

And when they break the aquarium,

when the fish die,

it's an image

for the internal death of the little girl.

She's the only one who doesn't stand for this.

Let me go!

Leave me!

The interest of the viewer always comes from the precision of what's shown.

This little family from a middle-class background

is the world I know the best.

And I speak of what I know.

The goal is to be precise enough in the details...

that the viewer, on account of this precision in the details,

takes interest...

in the people who are doing it.

It's a sort of construction, as opposed to deconstruction.

We deconstruct it, and out of the deconstruction,

we make a complete construction of the characters.

Are you more interested in consequences than in causes?

Yes, because I think that's the method we can use

to tell a story today with more of a good conscience

than when we claim to know the causes.

In literature, it's the same.

No novelist would want to write a novel today

which claimed to analyze completely

the reason why the story unfolds the way it does.

You can always narrate by means of...

what appears, what appears for everybody.

You can explain--

If you want an explanation--

You can only explain with structure.

The structure of the story explains something, maybe.

But it allows you to remain always ambiguous,

instead of a way of narrating that's explaining--

-Explanatory. -Explanatory.

It becomes long-winded and dull.

If you're dealing with a subject that's even a little more complex,

it's ridiculous to--

That's why the films--

Not genre films. How do you say it?

I can't find the words.

Forget it. Cut!

After seeing the accident with the dead bodies lying there,

he enters to wash the car,

and she has this attack.

Like a moment of phobia, of claustrophobia.

She realizes something about her life at that moment.

It's not always pleasant to realize something about your own life!

-It's purely physical, there. -Yeah.

That was the goal, to show it only with images.

It was complicated to shoot,

because with the brushes, for the continuity

she had to start crying exactly when that brush was there.

It was complicated, but I think it worked.

It's a montage of three pictures,

because it's a beach with the sea...

and at the horizon, there's a mountain.

At the beginning, it's only a picture, a photo, an ad--

-For Australia, right? -Yes, an ad for Australia.

And the last time it comes back,

the sea is moving.

Normally, it couldn't move.

There's no possibility in this image.

It gives you a--

It's peaceful, but at least for me,

-it's a frightening peace. -Is it death?

Yes, you can interpret it any way you want to.

Maybe it's also--

It may only be their memory of that picture

that they saw when they were washing the car

and which has become a frightening image for them,

perhaps also of peace.

As you like.

It's also ambiguous. I always try to find ambiguous solutions.

It's always the "strange" that's troubling.

All genre films work with that.

The things you don't know how to decipher are worrying.

Why do people hate foreigners?

Because they don't know them.

So they're afraid, and they hate them.

It's too bad, but true. It's as simple as that.

I remember, when we were invited to Cannes,

I said to the producer, "There are two scenes where they'll scream.

The scene where they break the aquarium,

the death of the fish,

and the--

The shot with the money."

And the producers aid, "That's ridiculous.

Maybe with the fish, because they're animals.

But never that."

But that's exactly what it was.

People walked out of the theater slamming the door.

Everywhere I showed the film, these scenes rose protests.

Because it's the worst taboo.

It's much less shocking

for parents to kill their children themselves,

than for someone to destroy money.

It's a total taboo in our society.

I didn't come up with that scene.

It's mentioned in the article I read about the people who did that.

I don't know if I could've come up with that.

But it was a real act.

They went to the bank, took all their money and they threw it--

The police recovered

all the little pieces that stayed down there.

And that's how they deduced that they'd thrown it all down there.

I remember with The Seventh Continent,

I was at Cannes for the first time.

And because it was my first film,

there were also discussions with the audience.

A woman got up and said,

"ls Austria really that depressing?"

Everybody laughed, fortunately.

And I think they understood that it was a kind of escape.

Because that's always the classic position.

If I don't want a film or a book to concern me,

I look for reasons for it not to concern me.

Because it takes place far away, for example.

I think this film can be understood just as well

in Japan, America, France or Austria.

It's not a portrait of Austria. It's a portrait of rich countries.

It's not a portrait of the third world. They have other problems.

But it's also--

For example, the film takes place in Linz.

You see it on the car.

But we didn't shoot any of it there.

I wanted the film to stay neutral.

I didn't want to have recognizable Viennese elements.

Because I think the film should be able to take place anywhere.

What I always try to do in my films is not be too--

I try to be precise, but not local.

Those are two different things.

What's also striking, with regards to the other films you've made,

is that there are no others in this film.

There aren't enemies.

No foreign bodies enter into it.

You're just by yourself.

And therefore it's even more disconcerting.

Yeah, because that makes the family into a type: "The family."

It's not "this" family, but "the" family.

And of course that's more provocative,

because you wouldn't want to be that family.

That's right. You wouldn't want to be that family.