Well, I've been reading a lot about the fifty years since the Second World War, about Western foreign policy and all that. I try not to let it get to me, but sometimes I just think that there's no hope.

We did not go to war in Afghanistan or in Iraq to, quote, 'impose democracy.' We went to war in both places because we saw those regimes as a threat to the United States.

You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art, we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich, when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war, literature was careful not to do the same, which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.

I mean, we're going to probably debate the Iraq war for at least as long as I'm alive.

And if there was one title that could be applied to all my films, it would be 'Civil War' - not civil war in the way we know it, but the daily war that goes on between us all.