"I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules."
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Quote collection
Michelangelo Antonioni quotes (page 3 of 6)
104 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"After you've learned two or three basic rules of cinema grammar, you can do what you like - including breaking those rules."
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"Neorealism taught us to follow the characters with the camera, allowing each shot its own real interior time. Well, I became tired of all this; I could no longer stand real time. In order to function, a shot must show only what is useful."
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"I've made films about the middle classes because I know them best. Everyone talks about what he knows best."
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"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."
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"We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean."
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"The public buys "art" - but the word is drained of its meaning."
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"The family today counts for less and less. Why? Who knows - the growth of science, the Cold War, the atomic bomb, the world war we've made, the new philosophies we've created; certainly something is happening to man, so why go against it, why oblige this new man to live by the mechanisms and regulations of the past?"
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"In Blow-up I used my head instinctively!"
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"It's untrue to say the colors I use are not those of reality. They are real: The red I use is red; the green, green; blue, blue; and yellow, yellow. It's a matter of arranging them differently from the way I find them, but they are always real colors. So it's not true that when I tint a road or a wall, they become unreal. They stay real, though colored differently for my scene."
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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."
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"I never think in terms of alienation; it's the others who do. Alienation means one thing to Hegel, another to Marx and yet another to Freud; so it is not possible to give a single definition, one that will exhaust the subject. It is a question bordering on philosophy, and I'm not a philosopher nor a sociologist. My business is to tell stories, to narrate with images - nothing else. If I do make films about alienation - to use that word that is so ambiguous - they are about characters, not about me."
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"I can't imagine love without a sexual charge."
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"Ingmar Bergman is a long way from me, but I admire him. He, too, concentrates a great deal on individuals; and although the individual is what interests him most, we are very far apart. His individuals are very different from mine; his problems are different from mine - but he's a great director. So is Fellini, for that matter."
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"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."
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"There can be no censorship better than one's own conscience."
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"There are many ways of communicating. Some hold the theory that new forms of communication between people can be obtained through hallucinogenic drugs."
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"I'll go on making films until I make one that pleases me from the first to the last frame. Then I'll quit."
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"I would throw out the sense of nation, "good breeding," certain forms and ceremonies that govern relationships - perhaps even jealousy. We're not aware of all of them yet, though we suffer from them. And they mislead us not only about ethics but also about aesthetics."
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