The film [Stalker] needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.

It is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not to be an artist: merely a sort of executor of other people's ideas.

The film [Stalker] needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.

A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.

Although the assembly of the shots is responsible for the structure of the film, it does not, as is generally assumed, create its rhythm; the distinct time running through the shots makes the rhythm of the picture, and the rhythm is determined not by the length of edited pieces, but by the pressure of the time that runs through them. The pieces that 'won't edit', that can't be properly joined, are those which record a radically different kind of time

History is not Time; nor is evolution. They are both consequences. Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul.

Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.