This revealing, if basic documentary runs through the films of Michael Haneke in reverse, starting with footage from the set of the Austrian director’s Oscar-winning ‘Amour’ (2012). There are plenty of extracts from interviews with Haneke during his near-25-year-film career, in which he confesses to being ‘a control freak’ (we witness him showing actors exactly how to act and filming the opening of 2000’s ‘Code Unknown’ over and over again). He resists explanations of his films, which limits how probing the film can be, but there’s an amusing (and illuminating) scene in which he makes the interviewer rephrase his question several times while talking about 2009’s ‘The White Ribbon’.
There’s little that will be new to Haneke’s fans, and the interviews beyond the icy master are limited to a handful of collaborators (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Isabelle Huppert and Juliette Binoche), so the film has the feeling of an affectionate inside job rather than a properly critical survey. But those same fans will surely enjoy scenes of one of the world’s great directors prepping the locations for 2005’s ‘Hidden’, or the footage of him teaching students at a university in Vienna.