Rainer Werner Fassbinder Quotes & Sayings

As long as movies are depressing, life isn't. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The best thing I can think of would be to create a union between something as beautiful and powerful and wonderful as Hollywood films and a criticism of the status quo. That's my dream, to make such a German film. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

I hope to build a house with my films. Some of them are the cellar, some are the walls, and some are the windows. But I hope in time there will be a house. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The more real things get, the more like myths they become. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

For all of us it's the things that won't work that keep our interest. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

I detest the idea that love between two persons can lead to salvation. All my life I have fought against this oppressive type of relationship. Instead, I believe in searching for a kind of love that somehow involves all of humanity. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

People often criticize my films for being pessimistic; there are certainly many reasons for being pessimistic but I don't see my films that way. They're founded in the belief that revolution doesn't belong on the cinema screen but outside in the world. Never mind if a film ends pessimistically but exposes certain mechanisms clearly enough to show people how they work and the ultimate effect is not pessimistic. My goal is to reveal such mechanisms in a way that makes people realize the necessity of changing their own reality. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

It isn't easy to accept that suffering can also be beautiful ... it's difficult. It's something you can only understand if you dig deeply into yourself. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

In the last analysis, terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defense measures to safeguard capitalism. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

People are terrible. They can bear anything. Anything! People are hard and brutal. And everyone is disposable. Everyone! That's the lesson. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The Jews have never been ashamed of being Jews, whereas homosexuals have been stupid enough to be ashamed of their homosexuality. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Women think in [Douglas] Sirk's films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk they think. It's something that has to be seen. It's great to see women think. It gives one hope. Honestly. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Better a street-sweeper in Mexico than a filmmaker in Germany! — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

And I don't believe that melodramatic feelings are laughable - they should be taken absolutely seriously. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Everyone must decide for himself whether it is better to have a brief but more intensely felt existence or to live a long and ordinary life. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Yes, actually ever since I saw his films and tried to write about them, Sirk's been in everything I've done. Not Sirk himself, but what I've learned from his work. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Every decent director has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again. My subject is the exploitability of feelings, whoever might be the one exploiting them. It never ends. It's a permanent theme. Whether the state exploits patriotism, or whether in a couple relationship, one partner destroys the other. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder

I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be. — Rainer Werner Fassbinder