My life and career is my own adventure.

Paradise is too perfect for humanity.

So I haven't thought about the critics for a long time.

There's nothing gratuitous about my films.

When I see a film I've finished, it's like another person made it. Like another mind.

When I was a teenager, I read a lot of Poe.

When I was five. That's when I started to love film.

You must push everything to the absolute limit or else life will be boring. People will be boring.

Young girls of 13 or 12 are great actors.

I think the camera was always my obsession, the camera movements. Because for me it's the most important thing in the move, the camera, because without the camera, film is just a stage or television - nothing.

No, it's interesting to remake a film for the contemporary audience today. I think it's a good idea; it needs to respect the original idea. Don't just take the title and change everything else.

The psychiatrists examine you and ask you about your life and work, and then they decide whether your film can be shown or not. It's a horrible experience.

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.

This is my life - I want to tell stories. There is something huge inside me that pushes me to tell stories, and tell stories for an audience and everybody.

To try and raise a budget for a film that is strictly for adults and both strong and graphic in content is not easy, especially when there is pressure to spend serious money on good special effects.

I went through a phase where I thought nostalgia was a bad thing.

If you don't like my movies, don't watch them.

The Opera was a very cold film, a hopeless and dark film, no hope, no love.

Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can't be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious.

If you make a film normally it's all right, the distributors are helpful and cooperative. But if you make a film that's a little stange, a little bizarre, then all the time it's a struggle with them.