Michelangelo Antonioni Quotes

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Nothing regarding man is ever inhuman. That's why I make films, not iceboxes.

Michelangelo Antonioni
You can't go to an LSD or pot party unless you take it yourself. If I want to go, I must take drugs myself.

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

Michelangelo Antonioni
Life should be taken ironically; otherwise, it becomes a tragedy.

Michelangelo Antonioni
The struggle for life is not only the material and economic one. Comfort is no protection from anxiety.

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

Michelangelo Antonioni
Today we no longer know what to call art, what its function is and even less what function it will have in the future. We know only that it is something dynamic - unlike many ideas that have governed us.

Michelangelo Antonioni
I want an actor to try to give me what I ask in the best and most exact way possible. He mustn't try to find out more, because then there's the danger that he'll become his own director.

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

Michelangelo Antonioni
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.

Michelangelo Antonioni
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.

Michelangelo Antonioni
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.

Michelangelo Antonioni
I'll go on making films until I make one that pleases me from the first to the last frame. Then I'll quit.

Michelangelo Antonioni
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.

Michelangelo Antonioni
I never feel empty. I travel a lot and I think about other films.

Michelangelo Antonioni
When I see a good film, it's like a whiplash. I run away, in order not to be influenced. Thus, the films I liked most are those I think least about.

Michelangelo Antonioni
That love is a conflict seems to me obvious and natural. There isn't a single worthwhile work in world literature based on love that is only about the conquest of happiness, the effort to arrive at what we call love. It's the struggle that has always interested those who produce works of art - literature, cinema or poetry.

Michelangelo Antonioni
It isn't easy to understand the lives of people different from your own.

Michelangelo Antonioni
The women I like, no matter what nationality, all seem to have more or less the same qualities. Perhaps this is because one goes looking for them - that is, you like that type of woman and then look for her.

Michelangelo Antonioni
I can't give any absolute definition of what love is, or even whether it ought to exist.

Michelangelo Antonioni
Reality has a quality of freedom about it that is hard to explain.

Michelangelo Antonioni
When you work on a character, you form in your mind an image of what he ought to look like. Then you go and find one who resembles him.

Michelangelo Antonioni
When I see nature, when I look into the sky, the dawn, the sun, the colors of insects, snow crystals, the night stars, I don't feel a need for God. Perhaps when I can no longer look and wonder, when I believe in nothing - then, perhaps, I might need something else. But I don't know what.

Michelangelo Antonioni
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.

Michelangelo Antonioni
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.

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

Michelangelo Antonioni
When I'm sure I have a story, I call my collaborators and we begin to discuss it. And we conduct studies of certain subjects to make sure of our terrain. Then, finally, in the last month or two, I write the story.

Michelangelo Antonioni
The way I relax, what I like doing most, is watching. That's why I like traveling, to have new things before my eyes - even a new face. I enjoy myself like that and can stay for hours, looking at things, people, scenery.

Michelangelo Antonioni
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.

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

Michelangelo Antonioni