If you are great, ‘El Topo’ is a great picture. If you are limited, ‘El Topo’ is limited.
My father was a monster. A monster! I cut with my family when I was 23 and I never see them again.
When you put a great amount of energy and hope in a big project, you can be destroyed if you don’t do it. But myself, I say: “To fail is only to see the way to fail.”
Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together.
A man doesn’t cry. In my life, I’ve never cried. I cannot do it. I am a man. How will I cry?
Humanity are not individuals; we are collective. And if we have difference, we have wars all the time. We have crisis. We need to open our mind. This is the only solution we have.
Don’t make your living with cinema because Hollywood will take you, will eat you, will destroy you. This is the reality. You have a good picture, have success, you take the person and they destroy you.
I don’t think of an actor. I think in the character, and then I search for the actor. Usually I’m thinking without names, because they will change my idea. No big egos. If I want egos – just mine. That is enough.
Movies have heart. Have mind. Have power. Have ambition.
I ask of cinema what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs.
I don’t live in France; I live in myself.
The mole is an animal that digs passages searching for the sun. Sometimes he reaches the surface. When he looks at the sun he goes blind.
My wife is 37 years younger than me. I don’t feel the difference.
I was raping Frank Herbert but with love.
The planet is ill, everyone knows that. But I need to be optimistic, otherwise I would just be adding to the negativity. So every night I come on Madrid TV and read a piece of good news.
I don’t see myself as a moviemaker only, you know? When I can do a picture, I do. But I don’t work like a business, in pictures. I am not obliged to make one picture after the other in order to live.
The first thing I didn’t understand was my life. It’s a mystery. And today I don’t understand economy or politics. I don’t know why politics or economy are destroying the world, but I will understand after understanding.
For art to be art it has to cure.
I am not a commercial industry creator. I don’t believe in making art to make money.
You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.
I don’t regret any past. I am not there. I am not sorry not to make pictures, because I know one day I will do it. I intend to live 150 years.