Innovation comes spontaneously. I don't know if I've done anything new. If I have, it's just because I had begun to feel for some time that I couldn't stand certain films, certain modes, certain ways of telling a story, certain tricks of plot development, all of it predictable and useless.

I've always played down the drama in my films. In my main scenes, there's never an opportunity for an actor to let go of everything he's got inside. I always try to tone down the acting, because my stories demand it, to the point where I might change a script so that an actor has no opportunity to come out well.

I've made films about the middle classes because I know them best. Everyone talks about what he knows best.

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.

My films always leave me unsatisfied, since I've always worked under fairly disastrous conditions economically.

I want an actor to try to give me what I ask in the best and most exact way possible. He mustn't try to find out more, because then there's the danger that he'll become his own director.

Neorealism taught us to follow the characters with the camera, allowing each shot its own real interior time. Well, I became tired of all this; I could no longer stand real time. In order to function, a shot must show only what is useful.