People often criticize my films for being pessimistic. There are certainly plenty of reasons for being pessimistic, but I don’t see my films that way. They are founded in the belief that revolution doesn’t belong on the cinema screen, but outside, in the world. When I show people, on the screen, the ways that things can go wrong, my aim is to warn them that this is the way things will go if they don’t change their lives. Never mind if a film ends pessimistically, if it exposes certain mechanisms clearly enough to show people how exactly they work, then the ultimate effect is not pessimistic. I never try to reproduce reality in a film. My goal is to reveal such mechanisms in a way that makes people realize the necessity of changing their own reality.

—Rainer Werner Fassbinder