So do you think Funny Games inspired Abu Ghraib?
You don’t need to inspire these kinds of things. You don’t need to tell people how to commit violence. When the first film came out — well, it had not come out yet, it was finished, but nobody had seen it yet. There was an article in Der Spiegel about a case in Spain where two young men got white gloves [part of the MO in Funny Games], very polite, the whole thing, and tortured a family — one person to death.
When the movie came out, they probably started blaming you for it.
It’s interesting to see the parallels, because the two young men that did that, in reality, were two well-educated people [like the culprits in the movie]. One was a student of chemistry, and when he was put in jail, he actually wrote a very intelligent essay. He quoted Nietzsche and everything and the worthlessness of life. The victims deserved to die, he argued, because there is no point to existence.
But you also suggest in your films that there’s an alienation effect that images and video and the whole culture seem to have that might lead to such behavior.
Our understanding of reality is based on television nowadays, and that’s of course very dangerous, because the images are not reality. So I always in my films try to nourish some distrust in taking this reality for granted.
Do you watch TV?
Not so much. It’s too boring. The programming gets worse every day — not as bad as in America, but nearly.
Do you think the world would be a better place without TV?
No. I mean I don’t want to appear here as an opponent of progress. And it’s also not worth thinking about it, because television exists and you can’t do anything about that. I mean, you could also argue the world would be healthier without automobiles. Maybe the only part one can play is to dampen the trust that people put in this and tell them to start thinking about it a little bit. The fact that people already believe they are informed even though they are not is also politically dangerous.
Many of your films are focused on violence. Have you ever seen any actual violence or experienced an act of violence?
Not violence to the degree that I show it in my films, no. No, thank God. But the day is not over. I mean, I am a little bit of a fearful person. For example, if I see a bunch of young people hitting each other over the head, I leave. But I experienced a little bit of violence in the ’60s, when the police would batter the students. I was one of them.
But you did change the world, right?
From time to time, we are all a little bit naive.
Everyone was disillusioned about the outcome of the ’60s protests. How did it affect you?
One is disappointed by how far back we were pushed. It’s a shock to see the society in which we live nowadays; we all try to eat each other, so to speak. And when you see how the ’60s generation tried to construct a world, it is quite a disillusionment how it turned out, yes.
