MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Normally, however, I try to avoid repetitions of any shot.

But, you know, Cronaca isn't more innovative than what comes after.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

In Blow-up I used my head instinctively!

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

Women are a finer filter of reality. They can sniff things.

Do you really think a man must be strong, masculine, dominating, and the woman frail, obedient and sensitive? This is a conventional idea. Reality is quite different.

I'm more or less skeptical about marriage, because of family ties, relations between children and parents - it's all so depressing.

The moment always comes when, having collected one's ideas, certain images, an intuition of a certain kind of development- whether psychological or material- one must pass on to the actual realization.

I never think in terms of alienation; it's the others who do. Alienation means one thing to Hegel, another to Marx and yet another to Freud; so it is not possible to give a single definition, one that will exhaust the subject. It is a question bordering on philosophy, and I'm not a philosopher nor a sociologist. My business is to tell stories, to narrate with images - nothing else. If I do make films about alienation - to use that word that is so ambiguous - they are about characters, not about me.

The women I like, no matter what nationality, all seem to have more or less the same qualities. Perhaps this is because one goes looking for them - that is, you like that type of woman and then look for her.