My basic view of things is – not to have any basic view of things. From having been exceedingly dogmatic, my views on life have gradually dissolved. They don’t exist any longer.
We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal.
Death: Do you never stop questioning? Antonius Block: No. I never stop.
First, I write down all I know about the story, at length and in detail. Then I sink the iceberg and let some of it float up just a little.
I feel very strongly that I’m surrounded by other realities.
To shoot a film is to organize an entire universe.
Our social relationships are limited, most of the time, to gossip and criticizing people’s behavior. This observation slowly pushed me to isolate from the so-called social life. My days pass by in solitude.
Self-portraiture is something one should never get involved in, since it is wrong to lie even though one endeavours to tell the truth.
I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to man has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.
I’d prostitute my talents if it would further my cause, steal if there was no way out, killing my friends or anyone else if it would help my art.
Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness.
I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.
The older I become, the more I think about my mother.
I hope I never get so old I get religious.
Today we say all art is political. But I’d say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes to the same thing. It’s a matter of attitudes.
The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny the existence of each other.
When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings.
I want knowledge. Not belief. Not surmise. But knowledge. I want God to put out His hand, show His face, speak to me.
I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil – or perhaps a saint – out of stone.
The theater is like a faithful wife. The film is the great adventure – the costly, exacting mistress.