Pastoral Resources

The silent film has a lot of meanings. The first part of the film is comic. It represents the burlesque feel of those silent films. But I think that the second part of the film is full of tenderness and emotion.

The 1980s really ended for me in 1992 with the film Kika.

With this silent film, I wanted to hide what was going on in the clinic. I wanted to cover it up in the best cinematic way and in an entertaining manner.

The challenge to me as a director was for the audience to see the film as going on in a straight line, so that they did not sense all of these break-ups. I did not want a film to be a collage of all these images.

It's all just one film to me. Just different chapters.

Romeo Must Die was the first film that I did where I was able to just be free as an actor.

It's a remake of a film called Inferno Affairs. It's a Hong Kong film, and if we come anywhere close to what they did in the original, we're going to have a hot property on our hands, because Inferno Affairs is a great piece.

After I did nine years of a television series, I didn't want to do anything really that involved going to a set and being in front of a camera for quite a while. And when I did start to want to do things, I wanted to focus more on film.

I was lucky enough to be the lady that was asked to be Maria in the Sound Of Music, and that film was fortunate enough to be huge hit. The same with Mary Poppins. I got terribly lucky in that respect.

I've never made a film using dialogue or speech.

The French have got to understand that a film is so expensive that it can no longer afford to be regional or even national in scope.

There is a broad cultural current that conveys the idea that a film is like a football team, it represents a nation, it is illustrated literature, filmed radio. These are outdated concepts, totally out of touch with today's realities.

My way of remaining French was the financing scheme I used for Quest for Fire, with Fox funds, since it started as a 100% American production. The film was not in French and yet was French in style, reflecting my personality.

You know what I would like to do: make a film with actors standing in empty space so that the spectator would have to imagine the background of the characters.

When I am shooting a film I never think of how I want to shoot something; I simply shoot it.

When a scene is being shot, it is very difficult to know what one wants it to say, and even if one does know, there is always a difference between what one has in mind and the result on film.

Now that I can edit the whole thing on AVID and edit the whole thing on tape, maybe I will do the next digitally, because maybe the quality will become less obvious between tape and film.

For behaviorist films, that's been much more useful - the change of technology - but for my kind of films, doing them on film is much better, because it's more beautiful.

On the first movie we got good reviews, but we were still dealing with genre stuff. It's going away. Judge the movie - is it a good one or a bad one? We know we made a great movie and it's being judged for just being a good film.

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.