One of the problems of the future world will be the use of leisure time. How will it be filled up? Maybe drugs will be distributed free of charge by the government.

It isn't easy to understand the lives of people different from your own.

If an actor tries to understand too much, he will act in an intellectual and unnatural manner.

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.

I read somewhere that happiness is like the bluebird of Maeterlinck: Try to catch it and it loses its color. It's like trying to hold water in your hands. The more you squeeze it, the more the water runs away.

It's obvious that I must explain what I want from an actor, but I don't want to discuss everything I ask him to do, because often my requests are completely instinctive and there are things I can't explain. It's like painting: You don't know why you use pink instead of blue. You simply feel that's how it should be - pink. Then the phone rings and you answer it. When you come back, you don't want pink anymore and you use blue - without knowing why. You can't help it; that's just the way it is.

My work is like digging, it's archaeological research among the arid materials of our times. That's how I understand my first films, and that's what I'm still doing...