I was raised in the city Wiener Neustadt. I attended the University of Vienna to study philosophy, psychology and drama. After graduating, I became a film critic and from 1967 to 1970 I worked as editor at the southern German television station Südwestfunk.My feature film debut was 1989's "The Seventh Continent", which served to trace out the violent and bold style that would bloom in later years of my work. Three years later, the controversial "Benny's Video" put my name on the map. My greatest success came in 2001 with my most critically successful film, "The Piano Teacher". The film won the prestigious Grand Prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and also won its stars, Benoit Magimel and Isabelle Huppert, the Best Actor and Actress awards. I have worked with Juliette Binoche on two occasions, after she expressed interest in working with me.My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.I am not worried about inducing boredom, irritation and frustration.I am the introduction of a malevolent force into comfortable bourgeois existence.
