Daily Inspiration Quote by Michelangelo Antonioni

Antonioni’s line sounds like a Zen koan, but it’s also a quietly militant declaration of method: the best decisions on a set aren’t always “decisions” in the managerial sense. They’re instincts sharpened by years of looking. When he says he never thinks of how he wants to shoot something, he’s not praising laziness or improvisation for its own sake. He’s arguing that the real thinking has already happened - in taste, in rhythm, in what he chooses to notice. By the time the camera rolls, intellect is supposed to get out of the way.

The subtext is a rebuke to the fetish of technique. Cinema culture loves the blueprint: storyboards, coverage plans, the auteur as chess player moving pieces. Antonioni flips that. His films (L’Avventura, La Notte, Red Desert) often hinge on emptiness, pauses, architecture, the feeling that modern life has more surfaces than answers. Over-planning that kind of mood can kill it. “I simply shoot it” is a bet on presence - on responding to a space, a face, a silence, the weather - and trusting that the frame will carry the meaning without being over-explained.

Context matters: Antonioni came up between neorealism’s street-level authenticity and a postwar Europe obsessed with rebuilding, organizing, rationalizing. His cinema is skeptical of that rationality. The sentence, almost stubbornly plain, performs what his work believes: clarity isn’t always produced by analysis; sometimes it arrives when you stop forcing the world to behave like a script.