Quotes by Michelangelo Antonioni

• Normally, however, I try to avoid repetitions of any shot.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• When I am shooting a film I never think of how I want to shoot something; I simply shoot it.
• Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer.
• In Blow-up I used my head instinctively!
• I meant exactly what I said: that we are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science.
• I mean simply to say that 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 don't want what I am saying to sound like a prophecy or anything like an analysis of modern society... these are only feelings I have, and I am the least speculative man on earth.
• I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules.
• I am neither a sociologist nor a politician. All I can do is imagine for myself what the future will be like.
• We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean.
• 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.
• Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.
• A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.
• 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.
• But, you know, Cronaca isn't more innovative than what comes after.