Quotes from Susanne Bier

There are certain things you cannot accept. There are certain things that human beings cannot tolerate.

I don't do a lot of rehearsal. I don't like rehearsals. I rehearse the day or morning. I spend one hour and a half with all the actors, and we go over the scenes, and we change it and change the dialogue, and we do a lot of things to it, but prior to shooting, I don't really rehearse.

People don't necessarily do evil deeds because they want to; people happen to do something with horrible consequences even if they meant to be kind.

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.

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

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.

Dogme is like leading a religious life, in that you are freeing yourself from making certain choices. It makes life easier.

In a way, our family is our modern identity.

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

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.

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

I think the lack of automatically feeling, 'Yes, the future is going to be like the present' - that is very much a Jewish thing.

For years, whenever I'd been travelling and came back to Copenhagen, I'd think: 'People are so stylish.' And it's not any one class. It's everyday life.

I think possibly, as an artist, you're always treated with a certain respect but also with a certain sort of nervousness.

I have a slight controversy with the Dogme brethren because I've been saying that rules are to be interpreted; not that I haven't followed the rules, because I don't see the point of submitting yourself to a set of rules if you don't follow them. But having said that, it is always a lot of interpretation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My mother has had breast cancer twice. And my mother has always been this very positive human being: a glass-half-full type. Like, when she was in treatment and feeling really bad, she would always talk about some nurse that was particularly nice to her.

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.'

The main thing as a director, you always want to have a bit of a worry about the material you're going to get yourself into. You want to be a bit scared of it so that you have that excitement of having to climb the mountain.

I'm extremely straightforward. And I can't do that sort of traditional girl thing of saying one thing that actually means something else. I never understood it, and I still don't understand it.

I think it is kind of depressing how few female filmmakers there are. I think it is in general depressing how few women there are in ... important positions in society