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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I lived in a kind of dream of communism.

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

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

I started very, very young to make movies - I was 21. And at the age of 27, 28, I'd done already three movies.