When making a film, I'm never concerned about whether the theme is new or whether it's been done before in cinema or not. I'm led to make films if there's a theme that interests me or I experience something in my own life that confronts me with something that I want to deal with.
To me cinema can be a much more friendly world if there's a lot of things to choose from.
Cinema has the capacity to be so physiological.
Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this.
In the theater you can chain a blue-assed baboon in the stalls and with a good script, good actors, and a good set you'd have what is called a production. With the cinema someone has to know about lenses and fine things. I have no time for the "auteur de cinema. " To me, it's meaningless.
I think that there's a very lucid side in cinema: entering a theater and seeing the film.
Bicycle Thief is a triumphant discovery of the fundamentals of cinema, and De Sica has openly acknowledged his debt to Chaplin.
I look on cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist.
More than an actor, I am a performer. . . I'm a great believer - honestly so, shamelessly so, vulgarly so - that cinema is for entertainment. If you want to send messages, there's the postal service.
Cinema’s characteristic forte is its ability to capture and communicate the intimacies of the human mind.
Big things have small beginnings.
You can never fully put your finger on the reason why you're suddenly, inexplicably compelled to explore one life as opposed to another.
I like it when somebody tells me a story, and I actually really feel that that's becoming like a lost art in American cinema.
My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.
When you have something that brings a real emotion, that's the power of cinema.
My cinema - the '50s, '60s - is different from the cinema today so I thought that it would not be bad to show that kind of cinema where we could dream.
I think that it's not a bad thing to not be too versed in the vocabulary of cinema, because you start to think that certain things are allowed and not allowed.
To the documentary director the appearance of things and people is only superficial. It is the meaning behind the thing and the significance underlying the person that occupy his attention. . . Documentary approach to cinema differs from that of story-film not in its disregard for craftsman-ship, but in the purpose to which that craftsmanship is put. Documentary is a trade just as carpentry or pot-making. The pot-maker makes pots, and the documentarian documentaries.
Watching a movie should be like hunting. Out of context, every image of the cinema is yours for a split second. Take them before they bury it.
I have no regrets. If I wanted to keep acting, I would have never left the cinema.