Best 82 quotes of Michelangelo Antonioni on MyQuotes

Actors are always a little high at work. Acting is their drug. So when you put the brakes on, they're naturally a little disappointed.

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.

After you've learned two or three basic rules of cinema grammar, you can do what you like - including breaking those rules.

All I know is that we are loaded down with old and stale stuff - habits, customs, old attitudes already dead and gone.

All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks.

Another reason for switching to color is world television. In a few years, it will all be in color, and you can't compete against that with black-and-white films.

A particular type of film emerged from World War Two, with the Italian neorealist school. It was perfectly right for its time, which was as exceptional as the reality around us. Our major interest focused on that and on how we could relate to it. Later, when the situation normalized and post-war life returned to what it had been in peacetime, it became important to see the intimate, interior consequences of all that had happened.

A woman's sex appeal is an inner matter. It stems from her mental make-up, basically. It's an attitude, not just a question of her physical features - that arrogant quality in a woman's femininity. Otherwise, all beautiful women would have sex appeal, which is not so.

Before each new setup, I chase everyone off the set in order to be alone and look through the camera. In that moment, the film seems quite easy. But then the others come in and everything becomes difficult.

Do you really think a man must be strong, masculine, dominating, and the woman frail, obedient and sensitive? This is a conventional idea. Reality is quite different.

Everyone has understood me in his own way. But I would have to understand myself first in order to judge - and so far, I haven't.

Favourite directors change, like favorite authors. I had a passion for Gide and Stein and Faulkner. But now they're no use to me anymore. I've assimilated them - so, enough, they are a closed chapter. This also applies to film directors.

Fitzgerald said a very interesting thing in his diary; that human life proceeds from the good to the less good - that is, it's always worse as you go on. That's true.

Hollywood doesn't believe in the death penalty for anyone except people who get cable TV without paying for it. Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.

Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.

I always mistrust everything I see, which an image shows me, because I imagine what is beyond it. And what is beyond an image cannot be known.

I am neither a sociologist nor a politician. All I can do is imagine for myself what the future will be like.

I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules.

I believe in the autobiographical concept only to the degree that I am able to put onto film all that's passing through my head at the moment of shooting.

I didn't like university life much at Bologna. The subjects I studied - economics and business administration - didn't interest me. I wanted to make films. I was glad when I was graduated. Yet it's odd; on graduation day, I was overcome with a terrible sadness. I realized that my youth was over and now the struggle had begun.

I dislike judging myself, but I will say I would be wealthy today if I had accepted all the films that have been offered to me with large sums of money. But I've always refused, in order to do what I felt like doing.

I don't know whether I am ever bored. I never look at myself.

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.

If an actor tries to understand too much, he will act in an intellectual and unnatural manner.

I forget about the relationship between myself and any actress when working with her.

I may film scenes I had no intention of filming; things suggest themselves on location, and we improvise. I try not to think about it too much. Then, in the cutting room, I take the film and start to put it together, and only then do I begin to get an idea of what it is about.

I meant exactly what I said: that we are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science.

I'm more or less skeptical about marriage, because of family ties, relations between children and parents - it's all so depressing.

I'm not rich and maybe I'll never be rich. Money is useful - yes - but I don't worship it.

In any case, the idea of giving "all" of reality is overly simple and absurd.

In Blow-up I used my head instinctively!

I never think in terms of alienation; it's the others who do. Alienation means one thing to Hegel, another to Marx and yet another to Freud; so it is not possible to give a single definition, one that will exhaust the subject. It is a question bordering on philosophy, and I'm not a philosopher nor a sociologist. My business is to tell stories, to narrate with images - nothing else. If I do make films about alienation - to use that word that is so ambiguous - they are about characters, not about me.

Ingmar Bergman is a long way from me, but I admire him. He, too, concentrates a great deal on individuals; and although the individual is what interests him most, we are very far apart. His individuals are very different from mine; his problems are different from mine - but he's a great director. So is Fellini, for that matter.

Innovation comes spontaneously. I don't know if I've done anything new. If I have, it's just because I had begun to feel for some time that I couldn't stand certain films, certain modes, certain ways of telling a story, certain tricks of plot development, all of it predictable and useless.

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. This is the system I prefer: to arrive at the moment when shooting is about to begin, absolutely unprepared, virgin. I often ask to be left alone on the spot for fifteen minutes or half an hour and I let my thoughts wander freely.

I read somewhere that happiness is like the bluebird of Maeterlinck: Try to catch it and it loses its color. It's like trying to hold water in your hands. The more you squeeze it, the more the water runs away.

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. If people talk a lot less, they will be happier. Don't ask me why.

It's obvious that I must explain what I want from an actor, but I don't want to discuss everything I ask him to do, because often my requests are completely instinctive and there are things I can't explain. It's like painting: You don't know why you use pink instead of blue. You simply feel that's how it should be - pink. Then the phone rings and you answer it. When you come back, you don't want pink anymore and you use blue - without knowing why. You can't help it; that's just the way it is.

It's untrue to say the colors I use are not those of reality. They are real: The red I use is red; the green, green; blue, blue; and yellow, yellow. It's a matter of arranging them differently from the way I find them, but they are always real colors. So it's not true that when I tint a road or a wall, they become unreal. They stay real, though colored differently for my scene.

I've always dreamed of getting to know the women of other countries better. When I was a boy, I remember, I used to get angry at the thought that I did not know German or American or Swedish women.

I've always played down the drama in my films. In my main scenes, there's never an opportunity for an actor to let go of everything he's got inside. I always try to tone down the acting, because my stories demand it, to the point where I might change a script so that an actor has no opportunity to come out well.

I've made films about the middle classes because I know them best. Everyone talks about what he knows best.

I've never had a method of working. I change according to circumstances; I don't employ any particular technique or style. I make films instinctively, more with my belly than with my brain.

I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space.

I would throw out the sense of nation, "good breeding," certain forms and ceremonies that govern relationships - perhaps even jealousy. We're not aware of all of them yet, though we suffer from them. And they mislead us not only about ethics but also about aesthetics.

Method actors are absolutely terrible. They want to direct themselves, and it's a disaster.

Monica Vitti is astonishingly mobile. Few actresses have such mobile features. She has her own personal and original way of acting.

My films always leave me unsatisfied, since I've always worked under fairly disastrous conditions economically.

My films have always had an element of immediate autobiography, in that I shoot any particular scene according to the mood I'm in that day, according to the little daily experiences I've had and am having - but I don't tell what has happened to me. I would like to do something more strictly autobiographical, but perhaps I never will, because it isn't interesting enough.

My work is like digging, it's archaeological research among the arid materials of our times. That's how I understand my first films, and that's what I'm still doing...