Monica Vitti is astonishingly mobile. Few actresses have such mobile features. She has her own personal and original way of acting.

Often to understand, we have to look into emptiness.

Normally, however, I try to avoid repetitions of any shot.

There can be no censorship better than one's own conscience.

I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space.

I'll go on making films until I make one that pleases me from the first to the last frame. Then I'll quit.

I rarely feel the desire to reread a scene the day before the shooting. Sometimes I arrive at the place where the work is to be done and I do not even know what I am going to shoot. This is the system I prefer: to arrive at the moment when shooting is about to begin, absolutely unprepared, virgin. I often ask to be left alone on the spot for fifteen minutes or half an hour and I let my thoughts wander freely.