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.

I simply know what the actor's attitude should be and what he should say. He doesn't, because he can't see the relationship that begins to exist between his body and the other things in the scene.

The script is a starting point, not a fixed highway. I must look through the camera to see if what I've written on the page is right or not. In the script, you describe imagined scenes, but it's all suspended in mid-air. Often, an actor viewed against a wall or a landscape, or seen through a window, is much more eloquent than the lines you've given him. So then you take out the lines. This happens often to me and I end up saying what I want with a movement or a gesture.

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.

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

Monica Vitti is astonishingly mobile. Few actresses have such mobile features. She has her own personal and original way of acting.

I never feel empty. I travel a lot and I think about other films.