Michelangelo Antonioni Quotes
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I forget about the relationship between myself and any actress when working with her.
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You cannot penetrate events with reportage.
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In any case, the idea of giving "all" of reality is overly simple and absurd.
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Neorealism taught us to follow the characters with the camera, allowing each shot its own real interior time. Well, I became tired of all this; I could no longer stand real time. In order to function, a shot must show only what is useful.
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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.
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The script is a starting point, not a fixed highway. I must look through the camera to see if what I've written on the page is right or not. In the script, you describe imagined scenes, but it's all suspended in mid-air. Often, an actor viewed against a wall or a landscape, or seen through a window, is much more eloquent than the lines you've given him. So then you take out the lines. This happens often to me and I end up saying what I want with a movement or a gesture.
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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.
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Till now I have never shot a scene without taking account of what stands behind the actors because the relationship between people and their surroundings is of prime importance.
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The script is simply a series of notes for the film.
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Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer.
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Nothing regarding man is ever inhuman. That's why I make films, not iceboxes.
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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.
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A man who renounces something is also a man who believes in something.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters.
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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.
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A film that can be described in words is not really a film.
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I never feel empty. I travel a lot and I think about other films.
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Reality itself is steadily becoming more colored. Think of what factories were like, especially in Italy at the beginning of the 19th century, when industrialization was just beginning: gray, brown and smoky. Color didn't exist. Today, instead, most everything is colored. The pipe running from the basement to the 12th floor is green because it carries steam. The one carrying electricity is red, and that with water is purple. Also, plastic colors have filled our homes, even revolutionized our taste. Pop art grew out of that and was possible because of this change in taste.
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It's only human and natural that an actor should see the film in terms of his own part, but I, as a director, have to see the film as a whole. He must therefore collaborate selflessly, totally.
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All I know is that we are loaded down with old and stale stuff - habits, customs, old attitudes already dead and gone.
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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.
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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.
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Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.
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A film you can explain in words is not a real film.
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I'm more or less skeptical about marriage, because of family ties, relations between children and parents - it's all so depressing.
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I meant exactly what I said: that we are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science.
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I don't know whether I am ever bored. I never look at myself.
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Michelangelo Antonioni
- Born: September 29, 1912
- Died: July 30, 2007
- Occupation: Film director
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