“What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution.”

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?

The most important thing of all, the thing that lasted, was the first feminist movement and the position of women in society. That completely changed and that was very, very important.

A monoculture is not only Hollywood, but Americans trying to export democracy.

Sometimes you are in sync with the times, sometimes you are in advance, sometimes you are late.

There’s no more film; now everything’s digital. I welcome this. It’s fantastic for me to have a new chance.

Having no children had been a kind of choice up to the moment when, from a choice, it became a sadness.

The movies I like are always movies where cinema is reinvented like if it was the beginning of cinema.

As a loyal believer in the Auteur Theory I first felt editing was but the logical consequence of the way in which one shoots. But, what I learned is that it is actually another writing.

Every film I have made has corresponded to a very special moment of my life. I like to think that if someone wanted to reconstruct the story of my life, they can just see my movies and know what I have been through.

Opera was the cinema of its time, so to bring back that popular appeal, you just need to unleash its visceral immediacy and excitement. Most productions don’t manage that – but when an opera does do it, you never forget it.

Egypt is kind of like the Hollywood of the Middle East. I mean, we had cinema maybe decades before the other Arab countries ever got independence.

I really believe musical form will go on. There’s got to be a way of making musical form in cinema live again.

There are no rebels in the cinema business.

Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.

Even the great bad guys in cinema history, they’re likable.

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.

Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama.