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Various Interview & Essay Excerpts
Fabio Rinaudo, "Foyer-Antonioni," Croniche del Cinema e della Teleolrione, No.7, December 1955
Dear Rinaudo, you ask me what I want to do in the cinema, or what I want to say, or what I want to be. I thought I could answer you. And yet, on the contrary, I have been sitting here in front of my typewriter for a half hour now, and every time I strike the keys and form a word, I feel as if I were playing a role. That is just it.
Playing a role I have not learned. It is not only unattractive to talk about oneself, it is difficult as well. Then, perhaps it is entirely impossible to foresee the ideas and the impulses we will have in the future, and the experiments we will make. We live so tightly bound up in reality,. and reality changes so quickly. The turris eburnea has crumbled away. The greatest effort is the effort to be oneself. That is to say, to make films which have some meaning in one's personal life, without straying into the confessional. This is the only way they can have meaning for others. You have asked me, after all, to state a poetic theory. And I answer that if I were sufficiently sure of being an artist to give a reply, then I should have closed myself off forever from the possibility of truly becoming one some day.
Enrico Roda, "37 Domande a Michelangelo Antonioni," Tempo, Milan, July 4, 1957
Q: What is the problem that lies closest to your heart?
A: Can there exist a saint without God?
Q: In a world without film, what would you have made?
A: Film.
Q: To what do you attribute your present activity?
A: To film.
Q: What do you feel is your principle fault, as a man?
A: Modesty.
Q: And as an artist?
A: It takes courage to write: "As an artist, I feel that. . ." Courage I don't have.
"Questions a Antonioni," Positif, July 1959
. . . Reality changes so rapidly that if one theme is not dealt with, another presents itself. Allowing one's attention to be attracted by each little thing has become a vice of the imagination.
All one has to do is to keep one's eyes open: everything becomes full of meaning; everything cries out to be interpreted, reproduced. Thus, there is no one particular film that I would like to make; there is one for every single theme I perceive. And I am excited by these themes, day and night. However, opportunity and other practical considerations limit and direct the choice. . . .
I never begin with an idea in order to end with a story. The majority of the stories that have taken form in my hands have come from outside, from germs which I have, as it were, breathed from the air. It can happen that films acquire meanings, that is to say, the meanings appear afterwards, which is natural enough. I am a man, and, of course, I am not without my own opinions. I do wish to say that suicide is not one of my preoccupations; it is only one among the very many possible solutions to the problem of life. A dreary solution, certainly, but as legitimate as any other. If life is a gift, then so must be the freedom we have to deprive ourselves of it.
L'Express, September 8, 1960
Q: Why do you use only natural settings?
A: Because they stimulate me more. It is the same as it might I be with a painter to whom someone said, "Here is a wall which I is to be covered with frescoes, so many yards long and so many yards high." These are the kinds of limitations which aid rather than fetter the imagination.
Q: Sometimes you transform your natural setting, you give it an appearance it does not actually possess, you work over it, you select it . . .
A: Yes, that's true. But you are describing a temptation I have every time I go anywhere~ to an office or to a private home. Sometimes it even arises in my own house. Someone comes to see me and suddenly, during the conversation, I begin to feel uneasy; it is because I feel that we are badly placed in the room, we are badly seated. He is on a sofa, I am next to him, while I ought to be seated opposite him. And instead of a wall with a picture on it behind the back of the man I am speaking to, I should like to have a window, perhaps even so that I could distract myself by looking out. When I shoot a film, that is all I am doing. I arrange things and people the way they ought to be.
L'Express, February 28, 1961
The film actor ought not to understand, he ought to be. One might argue that in order to be, he needs to understand This is not true. If it were true, the most intelligent actor would be the best actor. Reality often proves the contrary.
When an actor is intelligent, the effort he has to make to be a good actor is three times as great, for he wants to get to the bottom of everything, even the finest shades of meaning, and in trying to do so he trespasses on ground that is not his own-in fact, he creates obstacles for himself.
His reflections on the character he is playing, which, according to popular theory, should lead him to an exact characterization, end by hamstringing his work and depriving him of naturalness.
The actor should arrive on the set in a virgin state. The
more intuitive his work, the more spontaneous it will be.
The actor ought not to work on the psychological level but on
the level of the imagination. And the imagination is lit up spontaneously;
it has no electric buttons to press.
It is not possible to have true collaboration between actor and director. They work on two quite different levels. The director owes the actor no explanations except general ones about the character and the film. It is dangerous to go into details. Sometimes the actor and the director necessarily become enemies. The director must not compromise himself by revealing his intentions. The actor is a kind of Trojan horse within the director's citadel.
My favorite method consists in bringing about certain results by a certain amount of secret labor. I mean, by stimulating the actor to realize possibilities which lie in him but of whose existence he is himself unaware; by exciting not his intelligence but his instinct; by giving him not justifications but illuminations. One may even go so far as to cheat with the actor: to ask him for one thing in order to obtain another. The director ought to know how to discern and to separate the good and the bad, the useful and the superfluous, in what the actor has to offer.
The most important quality in a director is the ability to see. It is also valuable in directing actors. The actor is one of the elements in the image. A modification of his pose or gesture modifies the image itself. A speech which the actor makes in profile gives a different weight from one spoken full-face. A speech made with the camera placed overhead has a different value from a speech made with the camera below.
These are only a few very simple observations, but they prove what the director is: the man who composes the scene, who has to decide upon and then judge the actor's pose, gestures and movements.
The same is true for the speaking of the dialogue. The voice is one "noise" mingled with other noises, and the relationship among them is fully understood only by the director. Thus it is up to him to establish the balance, or imbalance, between various noises.
One has to listen to an actor for a long time, even when he is merely making mistakes. One has to allow him his mistakes and still try to understand how it may be possible to use his errors in the film; for his errors are, at that particular moment, the most spontaneous thing he has to offer.
To explain a scene or a piece of dialogue is to treat all the actors in the same way, for the scene and the dialogue do not change. All actors, however, require special treatment. Hence the need to seek out other methods. In short, the problem consists in leading the actor little by little into the right path, by means of apparently innocent corrections which must never arouse his suspicions.
This method of working may seem paradoxical, but it is the only one that enables the director to obtain a satisfactory result with amateur actors, actors whom, as we say, we "pick up off the streets." Neorealism taught us this. But it is also applicable to professional actors, even to the greatest among them.
I wonder whether there exists a really great film actor; what a great film actor would be like. The actor who thinks too much is troubled by one ambition: to be great. This is a terrible obstacle, and it carries with it the risk that his playing may be deprived of much of its truthfulness.
I do not think I have two legs. I have them. If the actor seeks to understand, he thinks. If he thinks, it will be difficult for him to find the power to be humble. And humility constitutes the best single point of departure in any attempt to find the truth.
Sometimes an actor is intelligent enough to overcome his limitations and discover for himself the proper path to follow-that is, he uses his own intelligence in order to apply the method I have described.
When this happens, the actor has the qualities of a director.