I wanted to get back to my style of 20 years ago after a long period of exploring horror and fantasy themes.
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.
When I was a teenager, I read a lot of Poe.
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.
The only true mystery is that our very lives are governed by dead people.