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Michelangelo Antonioni Quotes
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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.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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I have always imposed my wishes on the cameraman. Moreover, I have always picked them at the outset of their careers and, to a certain extent, have formed them myself.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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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
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The greatest danger for those working in the cinema is the extraordinary possibility it offers for lying.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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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
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I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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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
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Everything depends on what you put in front of the camera, what perspectives you create, contrasts, colors. The cameraman can do great things, provided he is well grounded technically. If a person hasn't the raw material, I obviously couldn't do anything with him. But all I ask of a cameraman is technical experience. Everything else is up to me. I was amazed to find that in America cameramen are surprised that this is the way I work.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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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
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It's very difficult to explain what I do. It is much more instinctive than you realize; much, much more. … the reasons that make me interested in a subject are, how shall I say, fickle. Many times I have chosen, among three stories, one for reasons that are entirely accidental: I get up and think this one will be stupendous because the night before I had a certain dream. Or perhaps I put it better by saying that I had found inside myself reasons why this particular story seems more valid. … I always have motives, but I forget them.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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The first quality of a director is to see. This quality is also valuable in dealing with actors. The actor is one of the elements of the image.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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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.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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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
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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
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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.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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I try to avoid repetitions of any shot. It isn't easy to find one in my films. You might, I suppose, see something twice, but it would be rare. And then, you know, every line requires its own kind of shot. The American method of shooting one actor continuously, then moving to the other, then intercutting both — this method is wrong. A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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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.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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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. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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I always want to tell stories. But they must be stories that evolve, like our own lives. Perhaps what I seek is a new kind of story.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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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
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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
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Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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She isn't my wife, really. We just have some kids.
No. No kids. Sometimes, though, it feels as if we had kids.
She isn't beautiful, she's just easy to live with.
No, she isn't. That's why I don't live with her.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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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
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When we find ourselves up against practical obstacles that can't be overcome, we must go forward. You either make the film as you can or don't make it at all.
Michelangelo Antonioni
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Michelangelo Antonioni
Creative Commons
Born:
September 29, 1912
Died:
July 30, 2007
(aged 94)
Bio:
Michelangelo Antonioni, Cavaliere di Gran Croce was an Italian film director, screenwriter, editor, and short story writer.
Known for:
Blowup (1966)
L'Avventura (1960)
L'Eclisse (1962)
The Night (1961)
Red Desert (1964)
Most used words:
film
people
image
character
reality
moment
actor
story
reasons
work
find
shooting
scene
mind
shot
Michelangelo Antonioni on Wikipedia
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