“Sometimes I think that I understand my movies after I make them. Really. I go very often off of instinct.”

English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more – like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.

The life before ’68 was very different from the life after ’68. Before ’68, our days were full of authoritarian moments. There were authorities everywhere. In fact, the movement of ’68 was young people against their authorities, children against their parents. And that remained.

Pornography is not in the hands of the child who discovers his sexuality by masturbating, but in the heart of the adult who slaps him.

I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is.

For example, Jewish directors coming from Germany or Austria and enriching Hollywood. In 15, 20 years, Hollywood became imperialistic. Cinema goes ahead when it is marriaged by other culture. Otherwise, it turns on itself.

I think that what I learned then, I didn’t know I was learning. I just knew that I was very privileged to see somebody who was a writer, a great poet, and very smart-faced. Suddenly Pasolini becomes a director, so he has to invent cinema.

I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. ‘The Dreamers’ was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.

A dolly move is a moral commitment.

To explore technology for me is something that I have to do. Otherwise, I feel completely left in the back… abandoned.

I don’t see my movies. I think it’s healthier and safer to keep a bit of distance. I’m afraid to be disappointed.

I was seduced by the nouvelle vague, because it was really reinventing everything. And the Italian cinema that one would see in the theaters in the late ’50s, early ’60s was Italian comedy, Italian style, which, to me, was like the end of neo-realism.

I like to be in a huis clos, as the French say – in one place. It’s something that in general can create a bit of claustrophobia. But for me, claustrophobia becomes almost immediately claustrophilia. I love it!

If New York is the Big Apple, tonight Hollywood is the Big Nipple.

I haven’t made a movie for a while, but I’ve watched a lot. It’s my major waste of time. I like to work, but also to be waiting for work.

I don’t film messages. I let the post office take care of those.

This is something that I dream about: to live films, to arrive at the point at which one can live for films, can think cinematographically, eat cinematographically, sleep cinematographically, as a poet, a painter, lives, eats, sleeps painting.

What, do y’all think you’re heroes?’ I didn’t know what to say at the time, but if he asked me again, I’d say no. I’d say there’s no way in hell. Nobody asks to be a hero. It just sometimes turns out that way.

Sometimes you can hear them talk, other times you can’t. All the same old cliches, is that a woman or a man?

I have been both praised and criticized. The criticism stung, but the praise sometimes bothered me even more. To have received such praise and honors has always been puzzling to me.

Sometimes I wish I hadn’t said something foolish. It is then that I realize the power of mime.

Sometimes they are a matter of luck, sometimes of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that you have seen. It is usually some incidental detail that heightens the effect of a picture, stressing a pattern, deepening the sense of atmosphere.

Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily.

And then you pull them back when you get what you want. Of course, sometimes, in the beginning, you’re going to push a little too far.

It is no secret that souls sometimes die in a person and are replaced by others.