Bernardo Bertolucci
Bernardo Bertolucci
Bernardo Bertolucciis an Italian film director and screenwriter, whose films include The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, 1900, The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky and The Dreamers. In recognition of his work, he was presented with the inaugural Honorary Palme d'Or Award at the opening ceremony of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Since 1979 he has been married to screenwriter Clare Peploe...
NationalityItalian
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth16 March 1941
CityParma, Italy
CountryItaly
Film students should stay as far away from film schools and film teachers as possible. The only school for the cinema is the cinema.
Sometimes I think that I understand my movies after I make them. Really. I go very often off of instinct.
A dolly move is a moral commitment.
I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is.
A monoculture is not only Hollywood, but Americans trying to export democracy.
I don't think you can in any way export culture with guns or tanks.
I don't film messages. I let the post office take care of those.
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.
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 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 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 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.
If you mention any ideological thing about shooting 'Last Tango in Paris,' I was thinking I was doing a political film.
If I don't fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot.