Quotes from Bernardo Bertolucci


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If I don't fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot.


Sometimes I think that I understand my movies after I make them. Really. I go very often off of instinct.


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.


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 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 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.


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.


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.


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.


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


New York has always embraced me.


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


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


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


I lived in a kind of dream of communism.


English dialogue is the best in the world. So dry and direct. The Italian language is beautiful, but it is too literary.


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 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!


'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.