"When I am shooting a film I never think of how I want to shoot something; I simply shoot it."
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Quote collection
Michelangelo Antonioni quotes (page 1 of 6)
104 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see."
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"A film that can be described in words is not really a film."
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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."
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"A man who renounces something is also a man who believes in something."
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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."
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"A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own."
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"Often to understand, we have to look into emptiness."
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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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"A film you can explain in words is not a real film."
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"Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing."
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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..."
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"The greatest danger for those working in the cinema is the extraordinary possibility it offers for lying."
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"I always mistrust everything I see, which an image shows me, because I imagine what is beyond it. And what is beyond an image cannot be known."
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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."
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"When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes his true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning, and we will no longer have to use them."
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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 my thoughts wander freely."
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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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"It's obvious that I must explain what I want from an actor, but I don't want to discuss everything I ask him to do, because often my requests are completely instinctive and there are things I can't explain. It's like painting: You don't know why you use pink instead of blue. You simply feel that's how it should be - pink. Then the phone rings and you answer it. When you come back, you don't want pink anymore and you use blue - without knowing why. You can't help it; that's just the way it is."
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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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