Quotes

What's necessary to me is not to be at the centre of all these historical events but to be at the periphery, because the periphery is the best position for storytelling. If you're at the centre you have famous people and big events, and whatever you say, historical prejudices play a part in how your story is received. In an unimportant place I get a mirror image of the world. All the important things are there but without the cliches that you get in the media.

When two people build a house. It is a symbolic act. What they want is stability.

[on Heimat] If you notice, in all the Heimats there is a house at the centre. These are all old houses so they symbolise a history that is bigger than the people who live there. When my characters die the house lives on. For me as a storyteller that means new beginnings. There is always the possibility of new beginnings.

Every artistic endeavor has "limits": facing the borders of possibility has always been important to me. However, I find that cinema is only now starting to lose its early restrictions. Only now do we acknowledge the possibilities of great, epic storytelling. Literature, which has existed for millennia, is much further ahead in that regard. There's the short form of verse, the dramatic structure of theater, the scope of novels... We still have many borders and taboos to break.

In 1980, with Heimat, my aim was to combine the experiences of a lifetime in a great narrative form. My main thesis was that a human being can be observed in a realistic fashion only if you consider the time and places of his existence as important as his attributes.

[on his early years as filmmaker] Like most directors of my generation, I had no interest in German films back then. I loved the great Italian filmmakers (Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti and Fellini), and I admired Truffaut, Godard and Malle. To me, German films were nothing but the expression of Adenauer's age of restoration. My rejection was so strong that I hardly know any of the films shown in the retrospective, and looking back that attitude is probably unfair.

The view through the small projection-room window onto the screen was for me identical to the view of the world. All dreams of the world came through this small window. And that's how I still see film today. The screen is a window, an opening into the world of poetry.