“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.”

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.

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

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.

I think that I used to love Hollywood movies. I remember great phases and moments. But, unfortunately, now is not the moment.

I like that 3D is based on the fact that you look with two eyes, so two cameras imitate that.

Commuting in a wheelchair is not easy. I live in a very old part of Rome. These cobbles everywhere… terrible! In London, it is the same. Every pavement is uneven.

What I was talking about was, of course, very autobiographical – ’68 was the moment when all the young people were incredibly excited, because when we were going to sleep, we knew we would wake up not tomorrow, but in the future.

I’m no longer interested in making political films. There’s something old-fashioned about them.

New York has always embraced me.

You know, in ten years you’re gonna be playing soccer with your tits, what do you think of that?

Planning other people’s actions means to prevent them from planning for themselves, means to deprive them of their essentially human quality, means enslaving them.

Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will.

How could I stand the separation from family and friends? It is ironic, I say, that in an authoritarian state it is only the prisoner of conscience who is genuinely free. Yes, we have given up our right to a normal life. But we have stayed true to that most precious part of our humanity-our conscience.

A part of society in our countries would still prefer an authoritarian regime today. These are people with the mentality of Homo sovieticus. But they also exist in France – just think of Le Pen – and even in Finland and Sweden.