Sweet and Low: Christian Petzold

The award-winning German director, chooses his best and worst scenes of all time

Best scene: 'Vertigo' (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

There's a scene that represents, to me, the Hollywood studio system coming to an end. Scottie Ferguson (played by James Stewart) is a detective who has been hired to follow someone's wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak). There's a scene after he has been tailing her car for a couple of days and they've finally met. Once again, he's following Madeleine through the San Francisco streets, but it's more intense because she's trying to seduce him. Hitchcock filmed it on a real street, with real cars and real people, and he was one of the first directors to leave the studio in this way. Also, the actors abandon method acting – we only see Scottie's face and he shows very little expression, and so it's like the end of the star system, too. Rather than concentrating only on the actor for the scene's meaning, which is the seduction by Madeleine, it's shown in the slow movement of her car and his small facial expressions. Sometimes I hate Hitchcock because everything seems over-rehearsed. His scenes can feel symbolic rather than real. But then I see this film, and there's so much reality inside his scenes that I love Hitchcock all over again.

Worst scene: 'Themroc' (Claude Faraldo, 1972)

I dislike this scene because it's such a middle-class picture of anarchy – it's like when my parents go twice a year to see a transsexual show. The movie is about a factory worker, Themroc (played by Michel Piccoli) who cracks up and he gets fired and reverts to Stone Age behaviour – he rapes a girl, rants and raves, and turns his bedroom into an urban cave. I disliked the whole film, but there's a scene that actually angered me, when he's sitting by a fire, naked, crying and talking nonsense, and he has just captured and roasted a policeman. I prefer movies about people who do things, and there was a lot of upheaval in France at the end of the Sixties, which makes the ordinariness of this film's idea of anarchy even more depressing.