Bernardo Bertolucci Quotes
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Film students should stay as far away from film schools and film teachers as possible. The only school for the cinema is the cinema.
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Sometimes you are in sync with the times, sometimes you are in advance, sometimes you are late.
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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.
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The movies I like are always movies where cinema is reinvented like if it was the beginning of cinema.
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A monoculture is not only Hollywood, but Americans trying to export democracy.
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I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is.
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English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more - like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.
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I am still against any kind of censorship. It's a subject in my life that has been very important.
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I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father.
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Sometimes I think that I understand my movies after I make them. Really. I go very often off of instinct.
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Pornography is not in the hands of the child who discovers his sexuality by masturbating, but in the heart of the adult who slaps him.
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I think that what I learned then, I didn't know I was learning. I just knew that I was very privileged to see somebody who was a writer, a great poet, and very smart-faced. Suddenly Pasolini becomes a director, so he has to invent cinema. It was like watching the invention of cinema. But I found out that Pasolini taught me a lot. It was, especially, the kind of respect that he had for reality. He had kind of epiphanies in his movies, like when a moment becomes full of grace, and it is like as if it was the most important moment in the life of a character.
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I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.
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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!
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A name? Oh, Jesus Christ. Ah, God, I've been called by a million names all my life. I don't want a name. I'm better off with a grunt or a groan for a name.
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I'm no longer interested in making political films. There's something old-fashioned about them. Young people now don't care for politics. It isn't present in life as it used to be. And increasingly I like films which reflect present-day reality.
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You live day by day. You can't build your life.
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I remember being young in the 1960s. We had a great sense of the future, a great big hope. This is what is missing in the youth today. This being able to dream and to change the world.
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To explore technology for me is something that I have to do. Otherwise, I feel completely left in the back... abandoned.
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There's no more film; now everything's digital. I welcome this. It's fantastic for me to have a new chance.
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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.
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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.
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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 think cinema all over the world was influenced by it, which was Italy finding its freedom at the end of fascism, the end of the Nazi invasion. It was a kind of incredible energy. Then, late '50s, early '60s, the neo-realism lost its great energy and became comedy.
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After many, many years, I fell out of love with politics. It's not something I like but it's the truth.
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If New York is the Big Apple, tonight Hollywood is the Big Nipple.
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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.
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I like that 3D is based on the fact that you look with two eyes, so two cameras imitate that.
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I don't think you can in any way export culture with guns or tanks.
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I think that Hollywood should also be influenced by directors from Hong Kong. You see how Quentin Tarantino is really the example of how you can develop, and how you can go ahead if you accept the existence of different cinematic cultures. There you have Quentin playing with kung-fu. That's why the independents are the most interesting.
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Having no children had been a kind of choice up to the moment when, from a choice, it became a sadness.
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