New York has always embraced me.

A dolly move is a moral commitment.

I lived in a kind of dream of communism.

You live day by day. You can't build your life.

I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is.

I wanted already to be a filmmaker after I saw 'La Dolce Vita.'

I don't film messages. I let the post office take care of those.

If New York is the Big Apple, tonight Hollywood is the Big Nipple.

I saw 'Avatar' and liked it very much. It was a great achievement.

I don't think you can in any way export culture with guns or tanks.

I make movies in order to make things understood, not to be shocking.

A monoculture is not only Hollywood, but Americans trying to export democracy.

I like that 3D is based on the fact that you look with two eyes, so two cameras imitate that.

My father basically had two ways of judging anything. Either something was poetic or it wasn't.

Sometimes you are in sync with the times, sometimes you are in advance, sometimes you are late.

You know, in ten years you're gonna be playing soccer with your tits, what do you think of that?

I am still against any kind of censorship. It's a subject in my life that has been very important.

The movies I like are always movies where cinema is reinvented like if it was the beginning of cinema.

Having no children had been a kind of choice up to the moment when, from a choice, it became a sadness.

After many, many years, I fell out of love with politics. It's not something I like but it's the truth.

Sometimes I think that I understand my movies after I make them. Really. I go very often off of instinct.

There's no more film; now everything's digital. I welcome this. It's fantastic for me to have a new chance.

I don't see my movies. I think it's healthier and safer to keep a bit of distance. I'm afraid to be disappointed.

If you mention any ideological thing about shooting Last Tango in Paris, I was thinking I was doing a political film.

If you mention any ideological thing about shooting 'Last Tango in Paris,' I was thinking I was doing a political film.

English dialogue is the best in the world. So dry and direct. The Italian language is beautiful, but it is too literary.

To explore technology for me is something that I have to do. Otherwise, I feel completely left in the back... abandoned.

I think that I used to love Hollywood movies. I remember great phases and moments. But, unfortunately, now is not the moment.

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.

Film students should stay as far away from film schools and film teachers as possible. The only school for the cinema is the cinema.

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.

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.

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.

The conformist understands that the reason of his desperate look for conformism is that he realises he is different and that he never accepted his difference.

Commuting in a wheelchair is not easy. I live in a very old part of Rome. These cobbles everywhere... terrible! In London, it is the same. Every pavement is uneven.

For American filmmakers, the Oscars is like a mystic thing. For me, it was being in a mirror of my dreams when I was dreaming of Hollywood when I was an adolescent.

I started in '69 to have psychoanalysis, and I realised very soon that I was changing, and that's I think why my movies were changing. They became much more open to dialogue.

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.

What always made me proud - almost blushing with pride - is that Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg all told me that 'The Conformist' is their first modern influence.

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.

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.

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.

I am in love with the idea of doing a movie in 3D. I think 3D would be great for the story I want to do, in a realistic, normal story, using 3D on the emotions in a kind of intimate story.

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.

'Dreamers' was because I really wanted to go back after I heard so much nonsense about '68. I wanted to go back to what for me was '68, when young people thought that they could change the world.

I like being able to see an innocence in people. I see a lot of beauty in youth. Young people are in progress. Their faces and bodies and minds are constantly changing. It's exciting to capture that on film.

I am in love with the idea of doing a movie in 3D. I think 3D would be great in a kind of realistic normal story without throwing objects to the camera, but using the 3D on the emotions in an intimate story.

I don't see my movies. When you ask me about one of my movies, it just goes in my memory because maybe sometimes I confuse one for another. I think all movies are like sequences, which is the body of my work.

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!

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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