Horror is the future. And you cannot be afraid. You must push everything to the absolute limit, or else life will be boring. People will be boring. 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.
Dario Argento
'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.
You must push everything to the absolute limit or else life will be boring. People will be boring.
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.
Horror by definition is the emotion of pure revulsion. Terror of the same standard, is that of fearful anticipation.
I don't like landscapes. I like cities. Lots of cities. I like buildings. I like streets.
There's nothing gratuitous about my films.
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.
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.
The Opera was a very cold film, a hopeless and dark film, no hope, no love.
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.
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.
I wanted to get back to my style of 20 years ago after a long period of exploring horror and fantasy themes.
I want to do what I want when I want to do it not be dictated to by audiences.
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.
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.
Every writer, to some extent, writes about himself.
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.
When I see a film I've finished, it's like another person made it. Like another mind.
Paradise is too perfect for humanity.
I also don't like films that are made just to make money, no this kind of film I don't like.
I like films to have something inside, I don't mean a message, I mean something from the soul.
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.
My life and career is my own adventure.
In each of my characters there is a little of me. Not strictly autobiographical but a little piece of my soul.
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.
I remembered watching the film from Alfred Hitchcock, 'Dial M for Murder,' and he shot almost all of that movie in one room. There was a genius in what Hitchcock did by manipulating things in that room so that you could see the distances between things like the tables and the vases because of how he used perspective.
'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.
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.
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.
I first came to cinema as a passionate filmgoer, when I was a child. Then, when I was a very young man, I became a film critic precisely because of my knowledge of cinema. I did better than others because of this. Then I moved on to screenwriting. I wrote a film with Sergio Leone, 'Once Upon a Time in the West.' And then I moved to directing.
When I was five. That's when I started to love film.
I'm very interested in portraying homosexual man and woman in my films because I'm interested in their lives and their problems.
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.
I'm Dario Argento, and my style is something recognizable I think by the audience.
Fear has disappeared. No more fear. In Asia, it is different. They've discovered again the fear and the psychology of the characters. Without psychology, the horror film doesn't exist.
But no one should have the right to manipulate my films in the first place.
If you don't like my movies, don't watch them.
But you know, as you say, the original versions of my films are getting out there, slowly.
Even in the former Soviet Union, they have good copies of my movies.
It's incredible that they censor films. It's sad.
When I was a teenager, I read a lot of Poe.
So I haven't thought about the critics for a long time.
I've never gone into analysis. But Freud opened a door, I know.
Maybe when I stop making movies, I'll understand my work better.
Young girls of 13 or 12 are great actors.
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.
In Italy the censor is very old and there are many judges and psychiatrists who analyse you.
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 like to watch many things, especially strange films and something recent, not just the story.
