The moment always comes when, having collected one's ideas, certain images, an intuition of a certain kind of development- whether psychological or material- one must pass on to the actual realization.

Method actors are absolutely terrible. They want to direct themselves, and it's a disaster.

The photographer in Blow-Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part the meaning of Blow-Up.

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

Till now I have never shot a scene without taking account of what stands behind the actors because the relationship between people and their surroundings is of prime importance.

Take Einstein; wasn't he looking for something stable and changeless in this enormous, constantly changing melting pot that is the universe? He sought fixed rules. Today, instead, it would be helpful to find all those rules that show how and why the universe is not fixed - how this dynamism develops and acts. Then maybe we will be able to explain many things, perhaps even art, because the old instruments of judgment, the old aesthetics, are no longer of any use to us - so much so that we no longer know what's beautiful and what isn't.

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