Quotes from Michelangelo Antonioni

Method actors are absolutely terrible. They want to direct themselves, and it's a disaster.

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

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.

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

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

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

I've always dreamed of getting to know the women of other countries better. When I was a boy, I remember, I used to get angry at the thought that I did not know German or American or Swedish women.

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...

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

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

All I know is that we are loaded down with old and stale stuff - habits, customs, old attitudes already dead and gone.

Actors are always a little high at work. Acting is their drug. So when you put the brakes on, they're naturally a little disappointed.

When you work on a character, you form in your mind an image of what he ought to look like. Then you go and find one who resembles him.

There are many ways of communicating. Some hold the theory that new forms of communication between people can be obtained through hallucinogenic drugs.

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

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.

One doesn't enter groups of people simply because one wants or needs to. One has an infinite number of opportunities that occur for no particular reason. Sometimes you feel a sudden unexpected pleasure at being where you find yourself.

I always want to tell stories. But they must be stories that evolve, like our own lives. Perhaps what I seek is a new kind of story.

I have always imposed my wishes on the cameraman. Moreover, I have always picked them at the outset of their careers and, to a certain extent, have formed them myself.

When we find ourselves up against practical obstacles that can't be overcome, we must go forward. You either make the film as you can or don't make it at all.

I've always said that the actor is only an element of the image, rarely the most important. The actor is important with his dialogue, with the landscape, with a gesture but the actor in himself is nothing.

We know that under the image revealed there is another which is truer to reality and under this image still another and yet again still another under this last one, right down to the true image of that reality, absolute, mysterious, which no one will ever see or perhaps right down to the decomposition of any image, of any reality.

Don't regard my characters as symbols of a determined society. See them as something that sparks a reaction within you so that they become a personal experience. The critic is a spectator and an artist insofar as he transforms the work into a personal thing of his own.