Germans try to categorize films: in a comedy, you just laugh and in a drama, you're not allowed to laugh. I don't believe in that, sometimes we laugh and cry in the same hour.
Fiction is my home, I came from fiction, I like to tell stories.
I always listen to music when I write, I need a rhythm to write.
I don't like violence in movies, I'm not a kind of Tarantino fan. But sometimes it's necessary.
Once I start shooting I forget the scriptwriter in me. I like things flowing. If you have talented actors who bring their own ideas, it can be much better than what you have worked out.
As a director, you can transform your vision more with the music.
Film is a two dimensional thing - it goes up and down and left to right but if you put that music into that two dimensional medium, it became like a third, fourth, and fifth dimension, I really believe in that.
The Turks who live here in Germany don't get their information from German media. They read Turkish newspapers and watch Turkish television. A sort of parallel media world has developed in Germany, especially as a result of technological advances like satellite TV and the internet.
When an audience is laughing, that's opening their souls somehow, and when you have an audience with an open soul, it's much better to hit them with a knife.
Whenever I'm making a feature film, I wish I were filming a documentary, because making feature films is so stressful. It happens every time.
Maybe every two films you need to do documentary to tell what you really want to tell and not be limited by the medium. With documentary you don't create the reality you have to hunt the reality.
I like it when actors depart from the script to find their characters.
I shot many scenes of Hamburg, albums full of postcard motifs, and I discarded almost all of them. I ride my bike through Hamburg every day. I go shopping here, I go to the doctor - and yet I no longer have the eye for telling stories about this damn city, even though I love it.