At some stage in most people's lives, things turn upside down, and nothing is as you expected it to be.
Susanne Bier
Denmark is like a big family of people.
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 did learn a lot from 'Things We Lost in the Fire,' but I've learned different things from different films.
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.
I never have particular actors planned when I'm in the process of writing.
I think it's extremely difficult consistently being a decent human being.
If I go home from a day of shooting, and I haven't at some point felt the magic, I'm really frustrated.
I don't know that there's more bullying or whether it's just more talked about. It seems to me that possibly that there's been a lot of bullying all the time, but at the moment, it's something that people are talking about.
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.
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.
You win an Oscar, and the movie that comes after that is always going to be compared.
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.
I don't want actors to be writers. I think it's too much responsibility.
Oftentimes, reality is much worse than what you can put in a movie.
In reality most people aren't as perfect as they want to seem.
Having done a Dogme film taught me the beauty of simplicity and austerity.
In a way, our family is our modern identity.
Dogme is like leading a religious life, in that you are freeing yourself from making certain choices. It makes life easier.
I don't feel I have an issue with listening or understanding English in any sort of way.
I see myself as a storyteller.
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.
John le Carre's 'The Night Manager' is a relentlessly exhilarating thriller with profound emotional depths.
I don't do a lot of rehearsal. I don't like rehearsals. I rehearse the day or morning. I spend one hour and a half with all the actors, and we go over the scenes, and we change it and change the dialogue, and we do a lot of things to it, but prior to shooting, I don't really rehearse.
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 have this almost obsessive desire to whomever is close to me: I want to have a very intense, close, intimate relationship with them.
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.
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.'
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 generally edit quite heavily. In general, there aren't many scenes that are sitting where they sat in the script in the final form.
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.
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.
For me, grief is a static thing, and my movies have an extremely dynamic sort of movement.
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.
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.
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.
Anders Thomas Jensen and I had talked about making a movie which addressed the cancer issue, and we didn't want to make it heavy-handed. We wanted to do something which had a lot of hope in it. And then for some reason we came up with a romantic comedy.
A lot of people who live in Denmark will understand Danish but not necessarily speak it.
My mother has had breast cancer twice. And my mother has always been this very positive human being: a glass-half-full type. Like, when she was in treatment and feeling really bad, she would always talk about some nurse that was particularly nice to her.
I think possibly, as an artist, you're always treated with a certain respect but also with a certain sort of nervousness.
I'm extremely straightforward. And I can't do that sort of traditional girl thing of saying one thing that actually means something else. I never understood it, and I still don't understand it.
When I watch a movie myself, I want to forget that I'm watching a movie, and I want to be inside the movie. That's the kind of experience I want my audience to have.
I quite like some of the movies that have many characters in them.
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've got this fear of becoming comfortable.
I've had a very fortunate, very privileged life. I say it with all humility because it could change tomorrow.
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.
I think the lack of automatically feeling, 'Yes, the future is going to be like the present' - that is very much a Jewish thing.
Women, nowhere in the world, have the kind of important position in society in the amount that they ought to have.
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.
