Quotes from Susanne Bier

There were 10 or 15 years where all the Scandinavian movies were gray and light brown. I got really bored with it. I really felt that movies had to have that life of vivid colors.

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.

There are good and bad movies, and long ones, and pretentious ones, and fun ones, and it's kind of healthy not just being able to switch off after ten minutes, but have patience.

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.

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.

I guess I strongly feel that we cannot pretend that the Third World is not part of our world. We cannot say 'OK, there's that problem over there, let's just close our eyes' - we cannot do that.

I never have particular actors planned when I'm in the process of writing.

I would say I'm basically interested in human beings, and I don't really care whether they're men or women. I think my comprehension is about the same for both.

If you look at children's stories in fairy tales, they're pretty brutal.

I don't know that there's more bullying or whether it's just more talked about. It seems to me that possibly that there's been a lot of bullying all the time, but at the moment, it's something that people are talking about.

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

A lot of people who live in Denmark will understand Danish but not necessarily speak it.

Denmark is like a big family of people.

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.

I did learn a lot from 'Things We Lost in the Fire,' but I've learned different things from different films.

If I go home from a day of shooting, and I haven't at some point felt the magic, I'm really frustrated.

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

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.

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.

If my daughter's going to go out in the winter with summer clothes, I'm gonna question it. And at some point, I assume, if the conversation goes on long enough, if I can convince her, she will put on some warm clothes. And I think that sort of exchange is pretty valid.

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.

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.

Parents can shape a child, but a great teacher can, too.

John le Carre's 'The Night Manager' is a relentlessly exhilarating thriller with profound emotional depths.