Michelangelo Antonioni

“I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules.”

“I meant exactly what I said: that we are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science.”

“I don't want what I am saying to sound like a prophecy or anything like an analysis of modern society... these are only feelings I have, and I am the least speculative man on earth.”

“I am neither a sociologist nor a politician. All I can do is imagine for myself what the future will be like.”

“You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters.”

“A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.”

“When a scene is being shot, it is very difficult to know what one wants it to say, and even if one does know, there is always a difference between what one has in mind and the result on film.”

“But, you know, Cronaca isn't more innovative than what comes after.”

“Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer.”

“Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.”

“Normally, however, I try to avoid repetitions of any shot.”

“I mean simply to say that I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space.”

“When I am shooting a film I never think of how I want to shoot something; I simply shoot it.”

“All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks.”

“Till now I have never shot a scene without taking account of what stands behind the actors because the relationship between people and their surroundings is of prime importance.”

“In Blow-up I used my head instinctively!”

“We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean.”

“When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them.”