“Of course, we avoid death. To know something is inevitable is one thing. To accept, to truly feel it... that's different.”
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'Funny Games' was conceived as a provocation. My other films are different. If people feel my other films are, or respond to them as provocation, then that's quite different. 'Funny Games' is the only one of mine where my intention was to provoke the audience.
And if there was one title that could be applied to all my films, it would be 'Civil War' - not civil war in the way we know it, but the daily war that goes on between us all.
Mainstream cinema raises questions only to immediately provide an answer to them, so they can send the spectator home reassured. If we actually had those answers, then society would appear very different from what it is.
When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivety, the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films, violence is made consumable.
