PROFILE: Michael Haneke

"Haneke’s interview technique owes more than a passing resemblance to Federer’s drop-shot: killing the speed on any question, refusing its underlying premise and gently rolling it back to your feet with a smile. He takes questions the same way he makes movies: by jamming expectations, if not waging all-out war on them.... The paradoxes of his cinema seem rooted in a knotty version of the introvert’s dilemma: an acute sensitivity to the brutality of others, that expressing itself under duress, risks its own form of violence." — from my Michael Haneke profile for New York magazine