Susanne Bier

“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 quite like some of the movies that have many characters in them.”

“I see myself as a storyteller.”

“I've had a very fortunate, very privileged life. I say it with all humility because it could change tomorrow.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Denmark is like a big family of people.”

“You win an Oscar, and the movie that comes after that is always going to be compared.”

“I think possibly, as an artist, you're always treated with a certain respect but also with a certain sort of nervousness.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Parents can shape a child, but a great teacher can, too.”

“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.”

“I think it's extremely difficult consistently being a decent human being.”

“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 did learn a lot from 'Things We Lost in the Fire,' but I've learned different things from different films.”