Susanne Bier

“If my daughter's going to go out in the winter with summer clothes, I'm gonna question it. And at some point, I assume, if the conversation goes on long enough, if I can convince her, she will put on some warm clothes. And I think that sort of exchange is pretty valid.”

“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.”

“John le Carre's 'The Night Manager' is a relentlessly exhilarating thriller with profound emotional depths.”

“Dogme is like leading a religious life, in that you are freeing yourself from making certain choices. It makes life easier.”

“I have this almost obsessive desire to whomever is close to me: I want to have a very intense, close, intimate relationship with them.”

“I've always been slightly hesitant about generalizing movies made by men and women being different in their nature; I think movies by each director are different. Having said that, I think that it's kind of disgraceful that there aren't more female directors.”

“Having done a Dogme film taught me the beauty of simplicity and austerity.”

“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've got this fear of becoming comfortable.”

“I don't want actors to be writers. I think it's too much responsibility.”

“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.”

“If you look at children's stories in fairy tales, they're pretty brutal.”

“You don't have to go very far away from Scandinavia to realize what an idyllic society it is.”

“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.”

“In a way, our family is our modern identity.”

“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.”

“I really don't like that modern notion of 'I don't need anyone.' I see a lot of young women feeling they have to be that way, they have to be hard, in a way. And what does that bring them? They're just going to be lonesome. They're going to be, at best, lonesome and capable, at worst, lonesome and hard. And is that what we want? No.”

“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.'”

“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.”

“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.”