Michelangelo Antonioni Quotes

When I am shooting a film I never think of how I want to shoot something; I simply shoot it.

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.

A film that can be described in words is not really a film.

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.

A man who renounces something is also a man who believes in something.

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.

A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.

Often to understand, we have to look into emptiness.

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.

A film you can explain in words is not a real film.

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...

Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.

The greatest danger for those working in the cinema is the extraordinary possibility it offers for lying.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I meant exactly what I said: that we are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science.

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.

A woman's sex appeal is an inner matter. It stems from her mental make-up, basically. It's an attitude, not just a question of her physical features - that arrogant quality in a woman's femininity. Otherwise, all beautiful women would have sex appeal, which is not so.

When I see nature, when I look into the sky, the dawn, the sun, the colors of insects, snow crystals, the night stars, I don't feel a need for God. Perhaps when I can no longer look and wonder, when I believe in nothing - then, perhaps, I might need something else. But I don't know what.

Take Einstein; wasn't he looking for something stable and changeless in this enormous, constantly changing melting pot that is the universe? He sought fixed rules. Today, instead, it would be helpful to find all those rules that show how and why the universe is not fixed - how this dynamism develops and acts. Then maybe we will be able to explain many things, perhaps even art, because the old instruments of judgment, the old aesthetics, are no longer of any use to us - so much so that we no longer know what's beautiful and what isn't.

Reality has a quality of freedom about it that is hard to explain.

Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer.

A director is a man, therefore he has ideas; he is also an artist, therefore he has imagination. Whether they are good or bad, it seems to me that I have an abundance of stories to tell. And the things I see, the things that happen to me, continually renew the supply.

I simply know what the actor's attitude should be and what he should say. He doesn't, because he can't see the relationship that begins to exist between his body and the other things in the scene.

I read somewhere that happiness is like the bluebird of Maeterlinck: Try to catch it and it loses its color. It's like trying to hold water in your hands. The more you squeeze it, the more the water runs away.

I can't give any absolute definition of what love is, or even whether it ought to exist.

If an actor tries to understand too much, he will act in an intellectual and unnatural manner.

I didn't like university life much at Bologna. The subjects I studied - economics and business administration - didn't interest me. I wanted to make films. I was glad when I was graduated. Yet it's odd; on graduation day, I was overcome with a terrible sadness. I realized that my youth was over and now the struggle had begun.

Reality itself is steadily becoming more colored. Think of what factories were like, especially in Italy at the beginning of the 19th century, when industrialization was just beginning: gray, brown and smoky. Color didn't exist. Today, instead, most everything is colored. The pipe running from the basement to the 12th floor is green because it carries steam. The one carrying electricity is red, and that with water is purple. Also, plastic colors have filled our homes, even revolutionized our taste. Pop art grew out of that and was possible because of this change in taste.

Monica Vitti is astonishingly mobile. Few actresses have such mobile features. She has her own personal and original way of acting.

All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks.

You cannot penetrate events with reportage.

Nothing regarding man is ever inhuman. That's why I make films, not iceboxes.

The script is simply a series of notes for the film.

People are always misquoting me.

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.

I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules.

The struggle for life is not only the material and economic one. Comfort is no protection from anxiety.

Violence is not the only means of persuasion.

After you've learned two or three basic rules of cinema grammar, you can do what you like - including breaking those rules.

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.

I've made films about the middle classes because I know them best. Everyone talks about what he knows best.

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.

In Blow-up I used my head instinctively!

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?

The public buys "art" - but the word is drained of its meaning.

We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean.