For me a true landscape is not just a representation of a desert or a forest. It shows an inner state of mind, literally inner landscapes, and it is the human soul that is visible through the landscapes presented in my films.
Money doesn’t make films. You just do it and take the initiative.
If you do not have an absolutely clear vision of something, where you can follow the light to the end of the tunnel, then it doesn’t matter whether you’re bold or cowardly, or whether you’re stupid or intelligent. It doesn’t get you anywhere.
I’m a very circumspect and prudent person, and I eliminate danger as far as it can be done.
I know for sure that there is only one step from insecticide to genocide.
There is never an excuse not to finish a film.
If you don’t read, you will never be a filmmaker.
One of the most original and poetic works of cinema made anywhere in the seventies.
I work very fast and steadily, and I don’t hardly ever notice that I’m working. It feels like just breathing or walking when I do films.
When you look at the paintings at Chauvet Cave, they’re not primitive or like children’s little scribbles, it bursts on the scene fully accomplished and when you look through the faces of cultural history, art history, it has never gotten any better.
It’s all movies for me. And besides, when you say documentaries, in my case, in most of these cases, means “feature film” in disguise.
We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs.
If you want to propose marriage to your girlfriend and you live in England and she is in Sicily, do the decent thing and walk down there. Travelling by car or aeroplane wouldn’t be right at such a moment.
We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.
What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs.
I like to direct landscapes just as I like to direct actors and animals.
I do whatever pushes me hardest. It’s coming at me and I try to. It’s like uninvited guest and I have to wrestle them out the door or through the window – get them out and get over with them quickly.
I do not believe in the Cinema verite. Sometimes a really good lie is better than any truth.
You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school.
I am so used to plunging into the unknown that any other surroundings and form of existence strike me as exotic and unsuitable for human beings.