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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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!