"My way of making cinema owes a lot to photography. Stealing images forced me as a boy to observe people at length, to study the movements of the persons, understand their gestures, almost anticipating them, to capture them in the magic instant of the click. It was a decisive training ground for my future professional life. For years, after all, I haven't done anything but obsessively study the movement of the human figure. And in what else does the work of the cinema director consist if not giving back on the screen the dynamics of real life? When one of my actors moves in the area limited by the framing, I know exactly if his way of acting is coherent with the essence of the drama. My mania for the composition of the framing is all derived from my experience as a photographer. As a boy I took dozens of pictures of the same subject because I dreamed of capturing the "cinematographic movement," unawares of the "progressive motion shots" Eadweard Muybridge had experimented with almost a hundred years earlier, but when I finally succeeded in making movies all I did was take with me everything photography had taught me, and it was not only technique. At the moment in which I frame the unwitting face of a stranger and press the shutter button, in that precise moment that person is no longer extraneous to my existence. Photography is simplicity, pure expressive freedom, the cinema is a completely different marvelous and complicated affair."