We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean.

After you've learned two or three basic rules of cinema grammar, you can do what you like - including breaking those rules.

My films have always had an element of immediate autobiography, in that I shoot any particular scene according to the mood I'm in that day, according to the little daily experiences I've had and am having - but I don't tell what has happened to me. I would like to do something more strictly autobiographical, but perhaps I never will, because it isn't interesting enough.

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

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.

Today we no longer know what to call art, what its function is and even less what function it will have in the future. We know only that it is something dynamic - unlike many ideas that have governed us.

A particular type of film emerged from World War Two, with the Italian neorealist school. It was perfectly right for its time, which was as exceptional as the reality around us. Our major interest focused on that and on how we could relate to it. Later, when the situation normalized and post-war life returned to what it had been in peacetime, it became important to see the intimate, interior consequences of all that had happened.