BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI

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.

To explore technology for me is something that I have to do. Otherwise, I feel completely left in the back... abandoned.

I don't film messages. I let the post office take care of those.

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.

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 still against any kind of censorship. It's a subject in my life that has been very important.

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

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!

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 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 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.

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

New York has always embraced me.

I lived in a kind of dream of communism.

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

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.

There's no more film; now everything's digital. I welcome this. It's fantastic for me to have a new chance.

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

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

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.

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

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