Often to understand, we have to look into emptiness.

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 may film scenes I had no intention of filming; things suggest themselves on location, and we improvise. I try not to think about it too much. Then, in the cutting room, I take the film and start to put it together, and only then do I begin to get an idea of what it is about.

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

I rarely feel the desire to reread a scene the day before the shooting. Sometimes I arrive at the place where the work is to be done and I do not even know what I am going to shoot. This is the system I prefer: to arrive at the moment when shooting is about to begin, absolutely unprepared, virgin. I often ask to be left alone on the spot for fifteen minutes or half an hour and I let my thoughts wander freely.

All I know is that we are loaded down with old and stale stuff - habits, customs, old attitudes already dead and gone.

I meant exactly what I said: that we are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science.