My favourite film-maker of the decade is Abbas Kiarostami. He achieves a simplicity that's so difficult to attain. - Michael Haneke

Consider the pigeon just a pigeon...There are lots of pigeons in Paris.

I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it's totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That's been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable.

Film is an artificial construct. It pretends to reconstruct reality. But it doesn't do that—it's a manipulative form. It's a lie that can reveal the truth. But if a film isn't a work of art, it's just complicit with the process of manipulation.