Michelangelo Antonioni Quotes

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

Michelangelo Antonioni
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
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
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
Is it important to show why a character is what he is? No. He is. That's all.

Michelangelo Antonioni
You mustn't ask me to explain everything I do. I can't. That's that. How can I say why at a certain moment I needed this. How can I explain why I needed a confusion of colors?

Michelangelo Antonioni
The principle behind the cinema, like that behind all the arts, rests on a choice. It is, in Camus' words, "the revolt of the artist against the real."
If one holds to this principle, what difference can it make by what means reality is revealed? Whether the author of a film seizes on the real in a novel, in a newspaper story or in his own imagination, what counts is the way he isolates it, stylizes it, makes it his own.

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
Don't regard my characters as symbols of a determined society. See them as something that sparks a reaction within you so that they become a personal experience. The critic is a spectator and an artist insofar as he transforms the work into a personal thing of his own.

Michelangelo Antonioni