With Carl Th. Dreyer I feel an almost sacred kinship. He was a pioneer, and I have a particular fondness for the films that were dismissed as failures in his own day: Vampyr and especially Gertrud.

Dreyer would easily write 500 pages and then edit them, cutting away relentlessly. The same went for the set designs. He would ask his scenographer to bring in all sorts of things, only to have most of it removed again. The pared-back rooms, the white light and the melancholic atmosphere in Dreyer’s films are very much drawn from the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi, whom he admired.

My personal admiration for Dreyer is expressed, among other ways, in the fact that I hired his cinematographer, Henning Bendtsen, for my own early films. I also owned his tuxedo (which I got from Bendtsen and wore in Cannes) and I still have his hat.

The large number of major female leading roles in Dreyer’s films was unusual at the time, and that is one thing I myself have learnt from him. The original title of Breaking the Waves, incidentally, was Amor Omnia (Love All), a direct reference to the final scene of Gertrud.