Top 30 Bernardo Bertolucci Quotes

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.

You live day by day. You can’t build your life.

Although some people call me anti-feminist, I know I wasn’t because Germaine Greer supported me.

I make movies in order to make things understood, not to be shocking.

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.

‘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.

I saw ‘Avatar’ and liked it very much. It was a great achievement.

I wanted already to be a filmmaker after I saw ‘La Dolce Vita.’

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 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 like that 3D is based on the fact that you look with two eyes, so two cameras imitate that.

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.

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 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.

I started very, very young to make movies – I was 21. And at the age of 27, 28, I’d done already three movies.

If you mention any ideological thing about shooting ‘Last Tango in Paris,’ I was thinking I was doing a political film.

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 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 don’t think you can in any way export culture with guns or tanks.

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.

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.

After many, many years, I fell out of love with politics. It’s not something I like but it’s the truth.

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.

A monoculture is not only Hollywood, but Americans trying to export democracy.

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.

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!

My father basically had two ways of judging anything. Either something was poetic or it wasn’t.

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.

I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is.

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.