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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Susanne Bier Quotes

Women, nowhere in the world, have the kind of important position in society in the amount that they ought to have.

– Susanne Bier

I don’t feel I have an issue with listening or understanding English in any sort of way.

– Susanne Bier

I’m a huge fan of Richard Curtis – there’s real grief, real compassion in his films as well as cheekiness; it’s a wonderful cocktail.

– Susanne Bier

For me, grief is a static thing, and my movies have an extremely dynamic sort of movement.

– Susanne Bier

I generally edit quite heavily. In general, there aren’t many scenes that are sitting where they sat in the script in the final form.

– Susanne Bier

You don’t have to go very far away from Scandinavia to realize what an idyllic society it is.

– Susanne Bier

I don’t feel that I’m strictly Danish; I don’t feel that my sense of humor is strictly Danish or my human sensibility is strictly Danish.

– Susanne Bier

I think it’s extremely difficult consistently being a decent human being.

– Susanne Bier

I’ve got this fear of becoming comfortable.

– Susanne Bier

I’ve always been slightly hesitant about generalizing movies made by men and women being different in their nature; I think movies by each director are different. Having said that, I think that it’s kind of disgraceful that there aren’t more female directors.

– Susanne Bier

Any creative process is about being in a territory which isn’t secure, isn’t necessarily familiar, and isn’t convenient in any sort of way. And that’s the excitement of it.

– Susanne Bier

I don’t want actors to be writers. I think it’s too much responsibility.

– Susanne Bier

I’ve had a very fortunate, very privileged life. I say it with all humility because it could change tomorrow.

– Susanne Bier

Having done a Dogme film taught me the beauty of simplicity and austerity.

– Susanne Bier

The foundations of our lives are far more fragile than we think. So we are severely shaken when life turns out to have a will of its own.

– Susanne Bier

I really don’t like that modern notion of ‘I don’t need anyone.’ I see a lot of young women feeling they have to be that way, they have to be hard, in a way. And what does that bring them? They’re just going to be lonesome. They’re going to be, at best, lonesome and capable, at worst, lonesome and hard. And is that what we want? No.

– Susanne Bier

When I watch a movie myself, I want to forget that I’m watching a movie, and I want to be inside the movie. That’s the kind of experience I want my audience to have.

– Susanne Bier

I believe in rules. I believe in artistic limitations, and I always have. I’ve always thought that setting out a set of rules before you start, and then being completely consistent with them, is the only way to make a really good film.

– Susanne Bier

Anders Thomas Jensen and I had talked about making a movie which addressed the cancer issue, and we didn’t want to make it heavy-handed. We wanted to do something which had a lot of hope in it. And then for some reason we came up with a romantic comedy.

– Susanne Bier

At some stage in most people’s lives, things turn upside down, and nothing is as you expected it to be.

– Susanne Bier

I think that being Jewish has generated an extremely strong sense of the importance of family. If I look at my Scandinavian colleagues, they don’t have that urgency about family. All my movies are about that.

– Susanne Bier

We always want to find good and bad guys, and I don’t believe in that.

– Susanne Bier

My favorite hobby is matchmaking. It’s a lot easier to do it in movies then in real life because in real life, people don’t do what I tell them to do.

– Susanne Bier

I have this almost obsessive desire to whomever is close to me: I want to have a very intense, close, intimate relationship with them.

– Susanne Bier

I think the good thing about Dogme is that it forces you into an extreme sense of reality because there’s no artificial light and no set design and all of those icings on the cake that you usually have on a movie.

– Susanne Bier

For the Oscars, I had a speech in my hand, and I just knew if I opened the piece of paper, I was going to be unable to read it. So I just thought, ‘I’m going to say, as coherently as I can, whatever I can.’

– Susanne Bier

I hate when the sun is high and there are no shadows. If I could do super high-budget movies, I would only shoot when the sun starts to get low – but you can’t just shoot for four hours every day.

– Susanne Bier

In a way, the whole notion of a blueprint of a building is not that different from a script for a movie. A sequence of spaces, which is what you do as an architect, is really the same as a sequence of scenes.

– Susanne Bier

I think most of my films all have a certain tone or intensity in them. They are tense, and you kind of anticipate some kind of catastrophe, but you’re not quite sure.

– Susanne Bier

A significant number of women who have been ill or had marital issues feel they have no value, and society is so keen on telling us that’s the case.

– Susanne Bier

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