And what about your approach to narrative?
We have a different kind of narration. For us, the story is the secondary thing. The main thing is always how you can touch the people? How can you go closer to real life? How can you understand something about life, because as we talk a lot of other things are happening. We don't know, for instance, what is happening under the table, but there are interesting, important and serious things happening.
So when you say you don't know what cinema is, do you mean traditional cinema, commercial cinema?
No. It's all kinds of cinema, just cinema, all cinema.
All cinema? You just don't feel a part of that?
No, that is the reason why I told you something about a kind of narration. For me, when I see something at the cinema it is always full of shit. This is a meaningful question. The difference is: how we go to the people, how we watch the people, how we work with our actors, that is absolutely different. That's the reason why I like it to do these things. Because on the other hand, the making of movies is very, very boring. We just have the script, but we never use it during the shooting. We have some actors, but we don't use actors that behave like actors. We work with them like friends or work with them using only their personalities. For me, the personality of the actors is always interesting. In this case, it doesn't matter whether you work with professional or non-professional actors.
You don't think there is a difference? Some directors think that non-professional actors bring something different.
No, in our case no difference. If you see some of our films, they need professional actors and non-professional actors because we are always looking at the personality. If someone starts acting in a scene we say immediately what are you doing? Don't play itjust be. That's the reason why we are interested in what is happening inside someone.
How do you respond to the fact that your films are often seen as metaphysical?
We don't think about metaphysics or any philosophical speculation because a film is concrete. We use a camera and shoot scenes. If you are a writer you have paper and can write a lot of things about this table. But if you are a film-maker you can just show this table. You can see immediately the kind of table and how interesting it is, but it is still only a table. That is the reason why I don't understand someone talking about philosophical or metaphysical things. No, it's not true. Please, just watch the movie; just listen to your heart. Please, trust your eyes: everything is very clear and very simple. Watch. That's important. Don't think about it too much. Everyone can understand it if they don't complicate it. It's just a simple film. It's a very primitive language.
Our writer, Krasznahorkai, he doesn't understand why we use this very primitive thing which is a film. He can write thirty pages about this table. Everybody has a fantasy and everybody can imagine a table, but if I show you it using the very primitive language of film it is only ever a table.