Bernardo Bertolucci Quotes

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Bernardo Bertolucci

Profession : Writer

Birth : March 16, 1940

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

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

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

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

I wanted already to be a filmmaker after I saw 'La Dolce Vita.'

Bernardo Bertolucci

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

'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

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

I lived in a kind of dream of communism.

Bernardo Bertolucci

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

Bernardo Bertolucci

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

Bernardo Bertolucci

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

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

Although some people call me anti-feminist, I know I wasn't because Germaine Greer supported me.

Bernardo Bertolucci

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

Bernardo Bertolucci

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

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

Bernardo Bertolucci

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

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

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