Michelangelo Antonioni
I didn't like university life much at Bologna. The subjects I studied - economics and business administration - didn't interest me. I wanted to make films. I was glad when I was graduated. Yet it's odd; on graduation day, I was overcome with a terrible sadness. I realized that my youth was over and now the struggle had begun.Collection: Struggle
I'm not rich and maybe I'll never be rich. Money is useful - yes - but I don't worship it.Collection: Worship
Hollywood doesn't believe in the death penalty for anyone except people who get cable TV without paying for it. Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.Collection: Believe
I forget about the relationship between myself and any actress when working with her.Collection: Actresses
I've always dreamed of getting to know the women of other countries better. When I was a boy, I remember, I used to get angry at the thought that I did not know German or American or Swedish women.Collection: Country
It's only human and natural that an actor should see the film in terms of his own part, but I, as a director, have to see the film as a whole. He must therefore collaborate selflessly, totally.Collection: Directors
Another reason for switching to color is world television. In a few years, it will all be in color, and you can't compete against that with black-and-white films.Collection: Black And White
When I'm sure I have a story, I call my collaborators and we begin to discuss it. And we conduct studies of certain subjects to make sure of our terrain. Then, finally, in the last month or two, I write the story.Collection: Writing
My films have always had an element of immediate autobiography, in that I shoot any particular scene according to the mood I'm in that day, according to the little daily experiences I've had and am having - but I don't tell what has happened to me. I would like to do something more strictly autobiographical, but perhaps I never will, because it isn't interesting enough.Collection: Interesting
A particular type of film emerged from World War Two, with the Italian neorealist school. It was perfectly right for its time, which was as exceptional as the reality around us. Our major interest focused on that and on how we could relate to it. Later, when the situation normalized and post-war life returned to what it had been in peacetime, it became important to see the intimate, interior consequences of all that had happened.Collection: War
Innovation comes spontaneously. I don't know if I've done anything new. If I have, it's just because I had begun to feel for some time that I couldn't stand certain films, certain modes, certain ways of telling a story, certain tricks of plot development, all of it predictable and useless.Collection: Innovation
I dislike judging myself, but I will say I would be wealthy today if I had accepted all the films that have been offered to me with large sums of money. But I've always refused, in order to do what I felt like doing.Collection: Order
My films always leave me unsatisfied, since I've always worked under fairly disastrous conditions economically.Collection: Film
Favourite directors change, like favorite authors. I had a passion for Gide and Stein and Faulkner. But now they're no use to me anymore. I've assimilated them - so, enough, they are a closed chapter. This also applies to film directors.Collection: Passion
The moment always comes when, having collected one's ideas, certain images, an intuition of a certain kind of development- whether psychological or material- one must pass on to the actual realization.Collection: Ideas
People are always misquoting me.Collection: People
The greatest danger for those working in the cinema is the extraordinary possibility it offers for lying.Collection: Lying
It's obvious that I must explain what I want from an actor, but I don't want to discuss everything I ask him to do, because often my requests are completely instinctive and there are things I can't explain. It's like painting: You don't know why you use pink instead of blue. You simply feel that's how it should be - pink. Then the phone rings and you answer it. When you come back, you don't want pink anymore and you use blue - without knowing why. You can't help it; that's just the way it is.Collection: Phones
Ingmar Bergman is a long way from me, but I admire him. He, too, concentrates a great deal on individuals; and although the individual is what interests him most, we are very far apart. His individuals are very different from mine; his problems are different from mine - but he's a great director. So is Fellini, for that matter.Collection: Long
Take Einstein; wasn't he looking for something stable and changeless in this enormous, constantly changing melting pot that is the universe? He sought fixed rules. Today, instead, it would be helpful to find all those rules that show how and why the universe is not fixed - how this dynamism develops and acts. Then maybe we will be able to explain many things, perhaps even art, because the old instruments of judgment, the old aesthetics, are no longer of any use to us - so much so that we no longer know what's beautiful and what isn't.Collection: Beautiful
One of the problems of the future world will be the use of leisure time. How will it be filled up? Maybe drugs will be distributed free of charge by the government.Collection: Government
The way I relax, what I like doing most, is watching. That's why I like traveling, to have new things before my eyes - even a new face. I enjoy myself like that and can stay for hours, looking at things, people, scenery.Collection: Eye
There's much talk about the problems of youth, but young people are not a problem. It's a natural evolution of things. We, who have known only how to make war and slaughter people, have no right to judge them, nor can we teach them anything.Collection: War
You cannot penetrate events with reportage.Collection: Events
All I know is that we are loaded down with old and stale stuff - habits, customs, old attitudes already dead and gone.Collection: Attitude
I can't imagine love without a sexual charge.Collection: Imagine
My work is like digging, it's archaeological research among the arid materials of our times. That's how I understand my first films, and that's what I'm still doing...Collection: Digging
Nothing regarding man is ever inhuman. That's why I make films, not iceboxes.Collection: Men
Reality itself is steadily becoming more colored. Think of what factories were like, especially in Italy at the beginning of the 19th century, when industrialization was just beginning: gray, brown and smoky. Color didn't exist. Today, instead, most everything is colored. The pipe running from the basement to the 12th floor is green because it carries steam. The one carrying electricity is red, and that with water is purple. Also, plastic colors have filled our homes, even revolutionized our taste. Pop art grew out of that and was possible because of this change in taste.Collection: Running
The public buys "art" - but the word is drained of its meaning.Collection: Art
Reality has a quality of freedom about it that is hard to explain.Collection: Reality
It's untrue to say the colors I use are not those of reality. They are real: The red I use is red; the green, green; blue, blue; and yellow, yellow. It's a matter of arranging them differently from the way I find them, but they are always real colors. So it's not true that when I tint a road or a wall, they become unreal. They stay real, though colored differently for my scene.Collection: Wall
That love is a conflict seems to me obvious and natural. There isn't a single worthwhile work in world literature based on love that is only about the conquest of happiness, the effort to arrive at what we call love. It's the struggle that has always interested those who produce works of art - literature, cinema or poetry.Collection: Art
I simply know what the actor's attitude should be and what he should say. He doesn't, because he can't see the relationship that begins to exist between his body and the other things in the scene.Collection: Attitude
I want an actor to try to give me what I ask in the best and most exact way possible. He mustn't try to find out more, because then there's the danger that he'll become his own director.Collection: Giving
The struggle for life is not only the material and economic one. Comfort is no protection from anxiety.Collection: Struggle
Neorealism taught us to follow the characters with the camera, allowing each shot its own real interior time. Well, I became tired of all this; I could no longer stand real time. In order to function, a shot must show only what is useful.Collection: Real
Violence is not the only means of persuasion.Collection: Mean
A director is a man, therefore he has ideas; he is also an artist, therefore he has imagination. Whether they are good or bad, it seems to me that I have an abundance of stories to tell. And the things I see, the things that happen to me, continually renew the supply.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Character
Monica Vitti is astonishingly mobile. Few actresses have such mobile features. She has her own personal and original way of acting.Collection: Acting
I never think in terms of alienation; it's the others who do. Alienation means one thing to Hegel, another to Marx and yet another to Freud; so it is not possible to give a single definition, one that will exhaust the subject. It is a question bordering on philosophy, and I'm not a philosopher nor a sociologist. My business is to tell stories, to narrate with images - nothing else. If I do make films about alienation - to use that word that is so ambiguous - they are about characters, not about me.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Men
Women are a finer filter of reality. They can sniff things.Collection: Reality
Sometimes actors' mistakes give me ideas I can use, because mistakes are always sincere, absolutely sincere.Collection: Mistake
I would throw out the sense of nation, "good breeding," certain forms and ceremonies that govern relationships - perhaps even jealousy. We're not aware of all of them yet, though we suffer from them. And they mislead us not only about ethics but also about aesthetics.Collection: Mislead Us
Method actors are absolutely terrible. They want to direct themselves, and it's a disaster.Collection: Actors
Actors are always a little high at work. Acting is their drug. So when you put the brakes on, they're naturally a little disappointed.Collection: Drug
Before each new setup, I chase everyone off the set in order to be alone and look through the camera. In that moment, the film seems quite easy. But then the others come in and everything becomes difficult.Collection: Order