The Author’s Signature: A Conversation with Michael Haneke
A master of the austere, Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke has spent his career unnerving audiences with his meticulously constructed, relentlessly provocative commentaries on modern Europe. And as with all his best work, his latest, Happy End, is both intellectually probing and utterly engrossing. Reuniting him with two of his greatest collaborators, Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant, this bone-dry satire infuses the story of a dysfunctional family with the director’s longstanding thematic preoccupations with technology, surveillance, and the sins of the bourgeoisie. While at the Toronto International Film Festival for the North American premiere of Happy End, which opens this week in New York, Haneke sat down with me to talk about his early experiences falling in love with cinema and the films that have shaped his singular aesthetic.