“The search for actors is a long and painful business.  It is impossible to tell until half-way through shooting whether you have made the right choice.  I would even go further and say that the hardest thing for me is to believe that I have chosen the right actor, and that his individuality does correspond to what I have planned.”

In discussing a film’s graphic realisation, Andrey Tarkovsky says, “On occasion I have even concealed the idea of a film altogether in order to make the camer-man handle it the right way”, seeming to point to an auteur’s perspective on filmmaking.

“One cannot conceive of a cinematic work with no sense of time passing through the shot, but one can easily imagine a film with no actors, music, decor or even editing.”

Andrey Tarkovsky’s philosophy of the purpose of the artistic image is for that image to open “up before us the possibility of interaction with infinity, the great function of the artistic image is to be a kind of detector of infinity…towards which our reason and our feelings go soaring, with joyful, thrilling haste.”