When I was a teenager, I read a lot of Poe.
My daughter, Asia, has been in many of my movies. I love working with her. In the beginning, I was not supportive of her being an actress, but now I think she is fantastic.
Then I realized my early work did have something special that audiences adored apart from what I humbly thought about them. They occupy a distinguished niche in Italian film history and probably always will.
This is my life – I want to tell stories. There is something huge inside me that pushes me to tell stories, and tell stories for an audience and everybody.
My life and career is my own adventure.
I like films to have something inside, I don’t mean a message, I mean something from the soul.
If you don’t like my movies, don’t watch them.
I want to do what I want when I want to do it not be dictated to by audiences.
Theres nothing gratuitous about my films.
I wanted something new, the supernatural. The witch, the sorcerer, I love this. I love the films of the witch and sorcerers and magic, its wonderful!
It irritated me that my fans kept wanting me to retread old ground.
The Opera was a very cold film, a hopeless and dark film, no hope, no love.
When I was five. That’s when I started to love film.
Paradise is too perfect for humanity.
I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man.
If you make a film normally it’s all right, the distributors are helpful and cooperative. But if you make a film that’s a little stange, a little bizarre, then all the time it’s a struggle with them.
I think the camera was always my obsession, the camera movements. Because for me it’s the most important thing in the move, the camera, because without the camera, film is just a stage or television – nothing.
Maybe when I stop making movies, I’ll understand my work better.
I wanted to get back to my style of 20 years ago after a long period of exploring horror and fantasy themes.
The only true mystery is that our very lives are governed by dead people.