Top 66 Quotes & Sayings by Bernardo Bertolucci
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Italian writer Bernardo Bertolucci.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
I am still against any kind of censorship. It's a subject in my life that has been very important.
I wanted to have a reaction from the audience. I wanted to be able to talk to somebody, and not be talking just to myself. That's when I did 'The Conformist,' 'Last Tango in Paris,' etc. And I found it was incredibly rewarding, something new.
I like that 3D is based on the fact that you look with two eyes, so two cameras imitate that.
I like to be in a huis clos, as the French say - in one place. It's something that in general can create a bit of claustrophobia. But for me, claustrophobia becomes almost immediately claustrophilia. I love it!
What always made me proud - almost blushing with pride - is that Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg all told me that 'The Conformist' is their first modern influence.
I lived in a kind of dream of communism.
You live day by day. You can't build your life.
I was writing poems when I was young, you know, because my father was a poet, so it was absolutely normal to follow my father.
I make movies in order to make things understood, not to be shocking.
The conformist understands that the reason of his desperate look for conformism is that he realises he is different and that he never accepted his difference.
I don't think you can in any way export culture with guns or tanks.
'Dreamers' was because I really wanted to go back after I heard so much nonsense about '68. I wanted to go back to what for me was '68, when young people thought that they could change the world.
English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more - like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.
I am in love with the idea of doing a movie in 3D. I think 3D would be great in a kind of realistic normal story without throwing objects to the camera, but using the 3D on the emotions in an intimate story.
I started very, very young to make movies - I was 21. And at the age of 27, 28, I'd done already three movies.
I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.
I like being able to see an innocence in people. I see a lot of beauty in youth. Young people are in progress. Their faces and bodies and minds are constantly changing. It's exciting to capture that on film.
English dialogue is the best in the world. So dry and direct. The Italian language is beautiful, but it is too literary.
I remember being young in the 1960s... we had a great sense of the future, a great big hope. This is what is missing in the youth today. This being able to dream and to change the world.
Although some people call me anti-feminist, I know I wasn't because Germaine Greer supported me.
New York has always embraced me.
What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.
Sometimes you are in sync with the times, sometimes you are in advance, sometimes you are late.
After many, many years, I fell out of love with politics. It's not something I like but it's the truth.
If I don't fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot.
I don't film messages. I let the post office take care of those.
There's no more film; now everything's digital. I welcome this. It's fantastic for me to have a new chance.
I think that I used to love Hollywood movies. I remember great phases and moments. But, unfortunately, now is not the moment.
I wanted already to be a filmmaker after I saw 'La Dolce Vita.'
I saw 'Avatar' and liked it very much. It was a great achievement.
I haven't made a movie for a while, but I've watched a lot. It's my major waste of time. I like to work, but also to be waiting for work.
When I shoot, I try to feel the body and the face and the weight of the actor, because the character until that moment is only in the pages of the script. And very often, I pull from the life of my actors. I'm always curious about what these characters and these actors are hiding about their lives.
A monoculture is not only Hollywood, but Americans trying to export democracy.
I started in '69 to have psychoanalysis, and I realised very soon that I was changing, and that's I think why my movies were changing. They became much more open to dialogue.
The problem in Hollywood is that they try to become the only kind of cinema in the world, okay? The imposition everywhere of a unique culture, which is Hollywood culture, and a unique way of life, which is the American way of life.
Sometimes I think that I understand my movies after I make them. Really. I go very often off of instinct.
I don't see my movies. When you ask me about one of my movies, it just goes in my memory because maybe sometimes I confuse one for another. I think all movies are like sequences, which is the body of my work.
I think politics is a higher build in life. You know? If you diffuse under normal, common sense of a story, you make it political. If you choose a conventional way for a story, or refuse to use the conventional way, you make it political.
I don't see my movies. I think it's healthier and safer to keep a bit of distance. I'm afraid to be disappointed.
I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is.
To explore technology for me is something that I have to do. Otherwise, I feel completely left in the back... abandoned.
If you mention any ideological thing about shooting 'Last Tango in Paris,' I was thinking I was doing a political film.
Commuting in a wheelchair is not easy. I live in a very old part of Rome. These cobbles everywhere... terrible! In London, it is the same. Every pavement is uneven.
My father basically had two ways of judging anything. Either something was poetic or it wasn't.
For American filmmakers, the Oscars is like a mystic thing. For me, it was being in a mirror of my dreams when I was dreaming of Hollywood when I was an adolescent.
A dolly move is a moral commitment.
The problem in Hollywood is that they try to become the only kind of cinema in the world, okay? The imposition everywhere of a unique culture, which is Hollywood culture, and a unique way of life, which is the American way of life. But Hollywood has forgotten that, in the past, what made Hollywood great and what made it go ahead was the fact that Hollywood was fed with, for example, Jewish directors coming from Germany or Austria and enriching Hollywood. In 15, 20 years, Hollywood became imperialistic. Cinema goes ahead when it is marriaged by other culture. Otherwise, it turns on itself.
The life before '68 was very different from the life after '68. Before '68, our days were full of authoritarian moments. There were authorities everywhere. In fact, the movement of '68 was young people against their authorities, children against their parents. And that remained. The most important thing of all, the thing that lasted, was the first feminist movement and the position of women in society. That completely changed and that was very, very important.
I am in love with the idea of doing a movie in 3D. I think 3D would be great for the story I want to do, in a realistic, normal story, using 3D on the emotions in a kind of intimate story.
The movies I like are always movies where cinema is reinvented like if it was the beginning of cinema.
I'm no longer interested in making political films. There's something old-fashioned about them. Young people now don't care for politics. It isn't present in life as it used to be. And increasingly I like films which reflect present-day reality.
Film students should stay as far away from film schools and film teachers as possible. The only school for the cinema is the cinema.
I remember being young in the 1960s. We had a great sense of the future, a great big hope. This is what is missing in the youth today. This being able to dream and to change the world.
A name? Oh, Jesus Christ. Ah, God, I've been called by a million names all my life. I don't want a name. I'm better off with a grunt or a groan for a name.
As a loyal believer in the Auteur Theory I first felt editing was but the logical consequence of the way in which one shoots. But, what I learned is that it is actually another writing.
I think that what I learned then, I didn't know I was learning. I just knew that I was very privileged to see somebody who was a writer, a great poet, and very smart-faced. Suddenly Pasolini becomes a director, so he has to invent cinema. It was like watching the invention of cinema. But I found out that Pasolini taught me a lot. It was, especially, the kind of respect that he had for reality. He had kind of epiphanies in his movies, like when a moment becomes full of grace, and it is like as if it was the most important moment in the life of a character.
This is something that I dream about: to live films, to arrive at the point at which one can live for films, can think cinematographically, eat cinematographically, sleep cinematographically, as a poet, a painter, lives, eats, sleeps painting.
Pornography is not in the hands of the child who discovers his sexuality by masturbating, but in the heart of the adult who slaps him.
Every film I have made has corresponded to a very special moment of my life. I like to think that if someone wanted to reconstruct the story of my life, they can just see my movies and know what I have been through.
I was seduced by the nouvelle vague, because it was really reinventing everything. And the Italian cinema that one would see in the theaters in the late '50s, early '60s was Italian comedy, Italian style, which, to me, was like the end of neo-realism. I think cinema all over the world was influenced by it, which was Italy finding its freedom at the end of fascism, the end of the Nazi invasion. It was a kind of incredible energy. Then, late '50s, early '60s, the neo-realism lost its great energy and became comedy.
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