You cannot penetrate events with reportage.

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.

Everyone has understood me in his own way. But I would have to understand myself first in order to judge - and so far, I haven't.

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.

When you work on a character, you form in your mind an image of what he ought to look like. Then you go and find one who resembles him.

I can't give any absolute definition of what love is, or even whether it ought to exist.

There's much talk about the problems of youth, but young people are not a problem. It's a natural evolution of things. We, who have known only how to make war and slaughter people, have no right to judge them, nor can we teach them anything.