Michael Haneke on smartphones and the social media era: “We’re getting more and more stupid”

Technology moving like it does, the world has changed irrevocably since Michael Haneke last made a film that wasn’t a) set ages ago (2009’s The White Ribbon) or b) about the elderly (2012’s Amour). Snapchat arrived in 2011, while Facebook’s user base has more than doubled again since Amour won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

His new movie, Happy End, is Haneke 2.0, in which the techno-curious 75-year-old director who mined the sinister potential of videotape in Benny’s Video (1992) and Hidden (2005) turns his steely glare on the social media age.

Where Hidden began with chillingly still footage surveilling a Paris apartment, Happy End’s equally creepy first shot is on a smartphone, as 13-year-old Eve Laurent (newcomer Fantine Harduin) spies on her mother, and then coolly poisons her, her textspeak augmenting the scene.

Eve’s father, Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz), meanwhile, is busy cheating on his girlfriend with a cellist, with whom he conducts filthy late-night Facebook chats. With his ex-wife in hospital, Thomas brings the young poisoner to live with his ageing father, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), and sister, Anne (Isabelle Huppert), in their plush mansion. Georges shares some of Eve’s death impulse, his lips visibly curled at the idea of sustaining his own life a moment longer, while businesswoman Anne is facing a possible legal battle after a worker at her construction firm suffers a near-fatal accident.

Calais is the backdrop to this twistedly amoral soap opera, where the Eurotunnel has brought both huge wealth to construction firms like Anne’s but also refugees in their thousands – a crisis that was dominating headlines as Haneke was developing Happy End.

After the gravity of his terminal illness drama Amour, however, it will relieve many to learn that Haneke’s latest is also a comedy – themes of matricide, the migrant crisis and middle-class obliviousness to it notwithstanding. In person, too, Haneke is a good deal less severe and more down-to-earth than you might imagine, as I found when we met up.

No, it was simply because in the meantime I wrote a different film called Flash Mob, but I couldn’t cast that properly, and that took a very long time. Writing the new script for this also took a fair amount of time.

Not really. I always set myself the same standard and challenge, so it’s not more or less difficult in that sense. Perhaps it’s actually less difficult because it’s easy to get money as a result.

Simple reason, it’s my lack of imagination. In all my films, the characters have the same names. I came up with those names a long time ago for a television film. After all, they all come from the same head.

The story of the girl who poisons her mother was in the previous script, already. So that’s what I took over from that project. I found it in the newspaper, so that’s the starting point.

I wanted a 13-year-old girl who you would imagine could poison her mother. I didn’t want some nice or naive young girl. It worked with Fantine because she had something about her face, something unusual, something mysterious, and that was the key thing.

Yes, it did. We tried 60 or 70 different girls. It always takes a long time. In the case of The White Ribbon, we had to audition 7,000 children for the parts.

Well, I’ve got one myself, as you can see [Haneke takes a smartphone from his trouser pocket], but I did have to research when it came to Snapchat and so on.

I’m not an expert in mobile phones, but I use one for arranging rendezvous, for normal telephone calls and so on. We’re all helpless now without one. We can’t think for ourselves any longer. We use the internet on them to find information, and what’s the result? Ultimately, we’re getting more and more stupid. But I couldn’t survive without one either.

Those other two films were an exception in that sense. But if you’re making a film about our society today you can’t avoid social media because it dominates our life. It’s not that I’m particularly fixated on the media or on technology in that way. It’s a social issue.

I’m not particularly afraid of that, no. But like anyone else I am afraid that there will suddenly be no electricity coming out of the socket: we won’t be able to eat, we won’t be able to do anything, we won’t be able to survive. That’s certainly worrying. And, of course, there is the question of criminality, cyber criminality, but I’m not specifically alarmed about social media. It’s a broader question about technology in general.

The amazing thing about it is the fact that social media have, to some extent, taken on the role that was previously the role of the church. Previously, if you did something bad in life you would go to the priest and you would confess. Now you go to a forum and you either expect to be forgiven or perhaps you expect to be punished and to be outed for what you’ve done. That was what was so interesting about the story of this little girl – there is a religious aspect to it.

I’m not a great fan of Chabrol, to be honest. Many years ago, I found the early films like Les Cousins (1959) very chic and so on. But, no, I’m not really a great fan. He’s technically very adept, but his films are not something that interest me particularly.

No, that’s not my intention. You could describe it as a bonus. What I think about in those cases is the role itself. In the case of Amour, I certainly wrote that part because I wanted to work with Trintignant because I loved him as an actor. I’d already encountered him because he read the narration in the French version of The White Ribbon. With Amour they were obviously both famous actors, she perhaps a little less so, but also very famous as a result of Hiroshima mon amour (1959). And it was often interpreted that that was part of the film, but that was not my primary intention.

At the time I wrote it, Calais was everywhere in the press. It was a focal point of all the discussions that were going on [about the refugee crisis]. And of course, it lent itself, for that reason, to the film. It was the ideal choice because it’s addressing the question of our ignorance of others. It’s about egocentrism within the family, at the workplace, in the circles in which we move, but also the nation as a whole, the way in which the misery of others is irrelevant to us individually. It’s all about our own little routines in everyday life.

I couldn’t have made a film about migrants themselves because I don’t know them.

Yes, that’s exactly how they’re seen by us: as an abstract danger, a depersonalised danger. As soon as somebody has a personality you enter into a relationship with them on an emotional level, and then it’s not as easy to dismiss them.

I originally just wrote in the script, “karaoke scene”, but it turned out that the actor couldn’t sing. So we wondered how to use his physicality in the film. Just at that moment, by chance, on the internet I saw this famous video of a girl of about the same age as the girl in the film who dances to that song. And it’s been viewed millions of times and there are parodies of it online, and we decided that we would do that instead. So he tries to parody it and that’s how it starts. It was great fun to do that scene.

Yes, I do look at YouTube.

Well, you can find so many classical music recordings that you can no longer get on disc in any way and that’s absolutely marvellous, and biographical films, for example, biographical documentaries about filmmakers. Dozens of them on Tarkovsky, for example. So I can watch those on a big TV, almost as a film. There’s a fantastic choice of material out there.

I don’t know if they’re illegal or not. Can they be on YouTube if they’re illegal?

Yes. Every film of mine, for example, when the DVDs are sent for the European Film Awards or whatever, it always ends up on the internet the next day. But there’s an institute out there which has the task of finding them and then having them removed.

No, I wouldn’t say that’s the case. Obviously, it’s more productive to live than to view, but you can also do both of those things.

I’m not so sure about that. With the students that I teach and the young people that I meet, I don’t get a sense that they’re victims of the media in that way.

We are all victims of the media, but in another sense. The question is the truthfulness of the information that we get on TV, in the news. We believe that we’re informed about global events, but ultimately, we don’t know anything. We believe it, but we can’t judge the truthfulness of what we hear. We believe that we know something, but that’s where the possibility of manipulation comes in. It opens up the door to manipulation, particularly manipulation of a political kind.

A simple example that I often give is a farmer in a mountain village before television and before the internet. He knew that village, knew the mountains, and then went to and would also know the neighbouring village. Now, that same farmer will have a TV and a computer and believes, at least, that he knows the world, but really, he knows nothing more than he actually knew before because what you need is personal experience to know something. It’s not knowing otherwise, it’s just believing that you know something, and that’s the danger. For example, I only believe that I know something about Afghanistan from the television, but I don’t actually know about it.

You can’t really be protected. You have to be sceptical and be attentive and keep on the lookout.