What happens to the characters in my films is not important. I could have them do one thing, or another thing. People think that the events in a film are what the film is about. Not true. A film is about the characters, about changes going on inside them. The experiences they have during the course of the film are simply things that ‘happen to happen’ to characters who do not begin and end when the film does. In Blow-Up, a lot of energy was wasted by people trying to decide if there was a murder, or wasn’t a murder, when in fact the film was not about a murder but about a photographer. Those pictures he took were simply one of the things that happened to him, but anything could have happened to him: he was a person living in that world, possessing that personality.

—Michelangelo Antonioni