I began taking liberties a long time ago; now it is standard practice for most directors to ignore the rules.

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

The struggle for life is not only the material and economic one. Comfort is no protection from anxiety.

That love is a conflict seems to me obvious and natural. There isn't a single worthwhile work in world literature based on love that is only about the conquest of happiness, the effort to arrive at what we call love. It's the struggle that has always interested those who produce works of art - literature, cinema or poetry.

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.

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.

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.