Top 56 Bernardo Bertolucci Quotes
#1. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#3. '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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#4. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#5. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#6. English dialogue is the best in the world. So dry and direct. The Italian language is beautiful, but it is too literary.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#7. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#10. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#11. After many, many years, I fell out of love with politics. It's not something I like but it's the truth.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#12. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#13. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#14. I started very, very young to make movies - I was 21. And at the age of 27, 28, I'd done already three movies.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#15. Although some people call me anti-feminist, I know I wasn't because Germaine Greer supported me.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#16. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#17. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#20. You know, in ten years you're gonna be playing soccer with your tits, what do you think of that?
Bernardo Bertolucci
#21. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#22. If you mention any ideological thing about shooting 'Last Tango in Paris,' I was thinking I was doing a political film.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#23. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#24. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#25. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#27. Sometimes I think that I understand my movies after I make them. Really. I go very often off of instinct.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#28. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#29. There's no more film; now everything's digital. I welcome this. It's fantastic for me to have a new chance.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#31. Having no children had been a kind of choice up to the moment when, from a choice, it became a sadness.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#32. I like that 3D is based on the fact that you look with two eyes, so two cameras imitate that.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#33. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#34. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#35. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#37. My father basically had two ways of judging anything. Either something was poetic or it wasn't.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#38. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#40. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#41. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#42. 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!
Bernardo Bertolucci
#43. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#44. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#45. Sometimes you are in sync with the times, sometimes you are in advance, sometimes you are late.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#46. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#47. I think that I used to love Hollywood movies. I remember great phases and moments. But, unfortunately, now is not the moment.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#48. A monoculture is not only Hollywood, but Americans trying to export democracy.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#49. To explore technology for me is something that I have to do. Otherwise, I feel completely left in the back ... abandoned.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#52. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#53. 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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#54. Film students should stay as far away from film schools and film teachers as possible. The only school for the cinema is the cinema.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#56. I am still against any kind of censorship. It's a subject in my life that has been very important.
Bernardo Bertolucci
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