Quote

Italian cameramen grow up immersed in an awareness of light. It is part of their mythology.

In Italy, it is difficult to see a film in the original language because the voice actors here are a mafia.

Then I realized my early work did have something special that audiences adored apart from what I humbly thought about them. They occupy a distinguished niche in Italian film history and probably always will.

I remember the first time I went to Italy when I was eighteen, I was in Florence and there were all these eighteen, nineteen, twenty-year-olds gliding past on Vespas with crinkly, long, hair, and I thought I was on the set of a movie. I couldn't believe that this was going on and I hadn't known about it before. I was flabbergasted.

I became interested in film making at around 16, when I discovered a friend of mine had a HI 8 camera which belonged to his father, which we were forbidden to use.

I just shot my first dramatic movie in France, and for those dramatic scenes that I shot, I would not want to look at those. There's a certain mindset you have to put yourself into for those scenes, and looking at the monitor would just take you out of it.

I was part of a group that had a cinema club so every week we would project two or three movies on 16 or 35mm.

I began to realise that film sees the world differently than the human eye, and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.

The longtime standard for American TV was 525 lines from top to bottom of the image. As a practical matter, that was roughly equivalent to 350 thousand pixels - pretty crude, given that photos made with your iPhone boast five million pixels.

In fact, it is amazing how much European films - Italian, French, German and English - have recovered a certain territory of the audience in their countries over the last few years.