Of course I am a child of European culture. There are a number of great directors from which I learned, but there is nobody in particular I got inspired from.

Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it's healthy to return to classical forms.

I give the spectator the possibility of participating. The audience completes the film by thinking about it; those who watch must not be just consumers ingesting spoon-fed images.

Film is simply the most complex way you can express yourself

I'm not really a happy person. It's a question of temperament. I have a tendency toward melancholy. You can feel quite happily melancholic.

An artist is someone who should raise questions rather than give answers. I have no message.

If I tell the audience what they should think, then I am robbing them of their own imagination and their own capacity of deciding what's important to them.

I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears with my work. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.

I try to get closer to reality, to get close to the contradictions. The cinema world can be a real world rather than a dream world.

Drama lives on conflict. If you're trying to deal with social issues seriously, there's no way of avoiding violence, which is so present in society.

Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.

We think in terms of apostolic journeys. God dares to put His greatest ambassadors in chains.

This is the twenty-first century - you have to know what you want, then set upon it with everything you've got.

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.

Think about yourself at least once in your life otherwise you may miss the best comedy in this world.

Everyone is a proponent of strong encryption.

Remember to keep the mind calm in difficult moments.

In a weird way, I live vicariously through the characters I play as an actor.

Tell your readers to use it or lose it. If you don't use your muscles, they get weak. If you don't use your mind it begins to fail.

Maybe our mistakes are what make our fate. Without them, what would shape our lives? Perhaps, if we never veered off course, we wouldn't fall in love or have babies or be who we are.

It is a mortal sin to discard the elderly.