Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I accomplish.
Read the heart and not the letter for the pen cannot draw near the good intent.
Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
When I am shooting a film I never think of how I want to shoot something; I simply shoot it.
A film that can be described in words is not really a film.
We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.
A man who renounces something is also a man who believes in something.
I think people talk too much; that’s the truth of the matter. I do. I don’t believe in words. People use too many words and usually wrongly. I am sure that in the distant future people will talk much less and in a more essential way. If people talk a lot less, they will be happier. Don’t ask me why.
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.
Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.
The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there’s a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.
Often to understand, we have to look into emptiness.
The greatest danger for those working in the cinema is the extraordinary possibility it offers for lying.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.