A Quote by Michelangelo Antonioni
You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters.
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Space is certainly something more complicated than the average person would probably realize. Space is not just an empty background in which things happen.
Before there was any talk of a movie, people would sometimes ask me what actors I would imagine playing these characters. And the only thing I could ever say is: I have such a clear idea of these characters that they'd have to play themselves.
I really believe in empty spaces, although, as an artist, I make a lot of junk. Empty space is never-wasted space. Wasted space is any space that has art in it. An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have but that he, for some reason, thinks it would be a good idea to give them.
I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood. My characters—I would like to have them heavier, more three-dimensional ... My characters have a profession, have characteristics; you know their age, their family situation, and everything. But I try to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world.
I would say any film can be called feminist that has female characters who have agency in their life, that are in charge of their fate or do important things or take up half the space. I would consider a film feminist, I don't care what it's about, but if the cast was gender balanced, where it would be just as likely that the boss or the best friend or whoever was female. It's really as simple as showing women being in charge of their destiny and giving female characters a voice.
I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space.
I mean simply to say that I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space.
Most writers have no idea how to make a film. It's a totally different skill set. Nor is it just to translate exactly what's on the page directly on to the screen - because that would be terrible. It would be five hours long, and the structure would be a mess. But the writers know the characters and the story.
The majority of the world is empty space. Empty space, empty space, empty space. All that we see in the world, the life, the animals, plants, people - it's all empty space. That's amazing!
Since I knew I was going to make a film that was purely about emotions, and I knew that I ran the risk of being accused of amnesia relating to the social film, to prevent this I decided it would be good to have characters who were on the margins of society. These are characters for whom love is really the only way to know that they're alive.
Of course there's a value in a storyboard if you do a big - let's say an action movie and actors have to move and act in front of a green screen because entire backgrounds exploding and cars flying through there have to be created separately, and in this case you better make sure the actors are precisely placed and the background action is moving in a certain moment, for this type of film you would need a storyboard.
With independent film, simply because they don't have the money to make a big-budget film, they're forced to make a story that's important to them, that they would like to see on film, a personal story that people can relate to, about people, where you can see the love of the characters.
Just like how male actors get to play varied characters, I would also like to play characters that people don't normally see female characters portraying on screen.
Can you imagine what it would be like if all the Aussie film talent was able to make Australian stories?
I would make a huge distinction between theater improvisation and film improvisation. There isn't much improvisation in film - there's virtually none. The people that theoretically could be good at this in a theater situation don't necessarily do this in a film in a way that will work, because it's much broader on a stage. But in a movie, it has to be real, and the characters have to look entirely real because it's being done as a faux documentary, so there are even fewer actors that can do that on film.
No one would want to pay a penny for an empty canvas by me. But it would be quite another if the empty canvas were signed by a great artist. I would be surprised if an empty canvas by Picasso or Matisse signed and inscribed with the words, 'I wanted to paint such and such on this canvas, but did not do so,' would not fetch thousands... After all, with an empty canvas, the possibilities are limitless, and so perhaps is the cash.
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