Quotes

The camera is an object that lies.

[after finding out that his movie The Age of the Earth (1980) had won no award at the 1980 Venice Film Festival] Awarding Louis Malle, who's a second-class director and makes commercial movies, and also Cassavetes, who is American and makes commercial films with the veneer of avant-garde, or Angelopoulos, who is the Academia of the old scholar avant-garde cinema, shows utter ignorance, corruption, racism, frivolity, in other words: a scandal which makes the Venice Film Festival crumble. Because the line-up was sabotaged by the press, since the Italian press writes only about American and French films, and it was also sabotaged by the jury. Suso Cecchi D'Amico awarded Louis Malle. Where is her authority? Gillo Pontecorvo, who I thought was a left-wing, anti-imperialist director, awarded imperialist cinema. George Stevens Jr., a representative of the Pentagon, and Andrew Sarris. Michel Ciment, a French critic, who the whole world knows receives money from the American Motion Pictures and the CIA to promote American films. An absolutely corrupt jury. So Carlo Lizzani made a grave mistake. The Italian Ministry of Entertainment made a grave diplomatic mistake towards Latin America and Brazil. Now I'm going to campaign in Brazil to shut down the Gaumont offices and sever all ties with the Italian public television, which exerted violent pressure to award Angelopoulos' film. It's a disgrace. So the Venice Film Festival is very good for the French and the Americans, but it's not good for us. We're not stupid and we know cinema, economics, technology, and even politics very well. So the shame is Venice's, and the scandal is Venice's. They're poor, decadent, reactionary wretches, including the Italian critics. They've massacred me. It's a disgrace, for Christ's sake. I was the great victim of this intolerance. I don't respect them, I respect nothing, because my film is far superior to all of this. My film is about the future, about a new world, about a new ideology and a new language. These decadent critics love Louis Malle, Hitchcock, and all that crap.