I always have motives, but I forget them.
I rarely feel the desire to reread a scene the day before the shooting. Sometimes I arrive at the place where the work is to be done and I do not even know what I am going to shoot.
We are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science. Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer.
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.
You mustn't ask me to explain everything I do. I can't. That's that.
This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.
I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible.
You must be painter who takes a canvas and does what he likes with it.
Everything depends on what you put in front of the camera, what perspectives you create, contrasts, colors.
She isn't my wife, really. We just have some kids.
No. No kids. Sometimes, though, it feels as if we had kids.
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.
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.
My work is like digging, it's archaeological research among the arid materials of our times.
The moment always comes when, having collected one's ideas, certain images, an intuition of a certain kind of development — whether psychological or material — one must pass on to the actual realization.
I don't want what I am saying to sound like a prophecy or anything like an analysis of modern society …. these are only feelings I have, and I am the least speculative man on earth.
Is it important to show why a character is what he is? No. He is. That's all.
Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.
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.
I've always said that the actor is only an element of the image, rarely the most important. The actor is important with his dialogue, with the landscape, with a gesture — but the actor in himself is nothing.
