Michelangelo Antonioni Quotes

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There's much talk about the problems of youth, but young people are not a problem. It's a natural evolution of things. We, who have known only how to make war and slaughter people, have no right to judge them, nor can we teach them anything.

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

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
We know that under the image revealed there is another which is truer to reality and under this image still another and yet again still another under this last one, right down to the true image of that reality, absolute, mysterious, which no one will ever see or perhaps right down to the decomposition of any image, of any reality.

Michelangelo Antonioni
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.

Michelangelo Antonioni
Sometimes I pick up a magazine and read a piece of film criticism — to the end only if I like it. I don't like those which are too free with praise because their reasons seem wrong and that annoys me. Critics who attack me do so for such contradictory reasons that they confuse me, and I am afraid that if I am influenced by one, I will sin according to the standards of the other.

Michelangelo Antonioni
I am not a theoretician of the cinema. If you ask me what directing is, the first answer that comes into my head is: I don't know.

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
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 never think ahead of the shot I'm going to make the following day because if I did, I'd only produce a bad imitation of the original image in my mind. So what you see on the screen doesn't represent my exact meaning, but only my possibilities of expression, with all the limitations implied in that phrase. Perhaps the scene reveals my incapacity to do better; perhaps I felt subconsciously ironic toward it. But it is on film; the rest is up to you.

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

Michelangelo Antonioni
One doesn't enter groups of people simply because one wants or needs to. One has an infinite number of opportunities that occur for no particular reason. Sometimes you feel a sudden unexpected pleasure at being where you find yourself.

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

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

Michelangelo Antonioni
You must be painter who takes a canvas and does what he likes with it. We are more like painters in past centuries who were ordered to paint frescoes to specific measurements. Among the people in the fresco may be a bishop, the prince's wife, etc. The fresco isn't bad simply because the painter used for models people from the court of the prince who ordered and paid for it.

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
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 it runs away.

Michelangelo Antonioni
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.

Michelangelo Antonioni
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...

Michelangelo Antonioni
I would like to make clear that I speak only of sensations. I am neither a sociologist nor a politician. All I can do is imagine for myself what the future will be like.

Michelangelo Antonioni
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 me thoughts wander freely.

Michelangelo Antonioni
My characters are ambiguous. Call them that. I don't mind. I am ambiguous myself. Who isn't?

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
Modern life is very difficult for people who are unprepared. But this new environment will eventually facilitate more realistic relationships between people.

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

Michelangelo Antonioni