All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks.

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 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.

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.

The script is simply a series of notes for the film.

When I see a good film, it's like a whiplash. I run away, in order not to be influenced. Thus, the films I liked most are those I think least about.

Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer.