Dario Argento Quotes

I used a Luma crane, a wounderful device; it makes the camera able to go anywhere. It was also used on Friday the 13th Part 3.

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

Each film I make changes me in some way. When I start the picture I’m one person and by the time I finish I’m another.

In Italy the censor is very old and there are many judges and psychiatrists who analyse you.

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.

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.

‘Macbeth’ is one of the best operas ever, and doing it was a great experience. I added some things to the opera based from my experience on the movie – such as some of the special effects and bits of film – to make it new and interesting. It was a very good work and a very good experience.

I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man.

But no one should have the right to manipulate my films in the first place.

I’ve never gone into analysis. But Freud opened a door, I know.

I remember when I was very young, I had a fever – a long rheumatic fever in bed for four months. And in the days, I stayed alone with the maid. I only had my father’s books with me. They were fantasy books about ghosts, and also books by Edgar Allen Poe that made a forever impression on me.

The process of writing and directing drives you to such extremes that it’s natural to feel an affinity with insanity. I approach that madness as something dangerous, and I’m afraid, but also I want to go to it, to see what’s there, to embrace it. I don’t know why, but I’m drawn.

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

I make a film – and once I’ve made it, everyone comes along and says ‘Ah! This is a film that’s political, or social’, or whatever. But I’m not telling the story that they see. I made a film, told a story, but I wasn’t thinking about exactly what it all meant.

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

I’m appreciated more abroad. In America, Japan… and in the United Kingdom.

For a long time, censors have been cutting my works. This makes me so sad, because many times they will tell me, ‘Television won’t like, so we have to cut, cut, cut!’

I like films to have something inside, I don’t mean a message, I mean something from the soul.

Every writer, to some extent, writes about himself.

I was very young, and I was on vacation with my family, and there was a retrospective of old films, and one of them was ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ with Claude Rains that was in color. It was something very important for my career because I began to follow these stories that were morbid.

‘Deep Red’ (1975) is my favorite movie. The character David Hemmings plays is very much based on my own personality. It was a very strong film, very brutal, and of course the censors were upset. It was cut by almost an hour in some countries.

But you know, as you say, the original versions of my films are getting out there, slowly.

Young girls of 13 or 12 are great actors.

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.

I wanted something new, the supernatural. The witch, the sorcerer, I love this. I love the films of the witch and sorcerers and magic, its wonderful!

My life and career is my own adventure.

We had many good directors – John Carpenter, Brian De Palma – but things have become polluted by business, money and bad relationships. The success of the horror genre has led to its downfall.

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.

I’m very interested in portraying homosexual man and woman in my films because I’m interested in their lives and their problems.

My mother was a famous photographer for actresses, including Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, and so many. I remember I went to school close to my mother’s studio, and for years, I went to the studio after school and just watched how she captured these beauties.

Americans are very enthusiastic. We have a new generation of moviegoers who love great horror films. I am a very imaginative man, and for me, it’s easy to speak with my dark side. I have very beautiful, interesting nightmares.

Shooting movies has changed, and me too – I have changed. And then, every film I do, something in my mind, my soul, changes. My natural change, I change at the same time as the films, I think.

Paradise is too perfect for humanity.

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

I’ve been lucky enough to have had the luxury of being able to make the picture I’ve wanted to make each time on my own terms and without compromise.

In each of my characters there is a little of me. Not strictly autobiographical but a little piece of my soul.

It’s incredible that they censor films. It’s sad.

Maybe when I stop making movies, I’ll understand my work better.

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

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.

Films are dreams. Many, many critics say to me that my films are not good because they are too unbelievable, but this is my style. I tell stories like they are dreams. This is my imagination. For me, it would be impossible to do a film that is so precise, that resembles real life.

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.