SOURCE: Bertolucci, Bernardo, and Chris Wagstaff. “Bernardo Bertolucci: Intravenous Cinema.” Sight and Sound 4, no. 4 (April 1994): 18–21.

In the following interview, Bertolucci discusses his relationship with his audience, his experience with Buddhism, and how he attempted to portray Buddhism in Little Buddha.

Bertolucci's Little Buddha makes a very different address to a very different audience from that of his films of the 60s and 70s. His earlier films (Before the Revolution, Partner, The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist) confronted the situation of a Marxist intellectual in contemporary Italy in the form of an Oedipal struggle with a fascist historical past and a bourgeois present, and earned him a position as one of Europe's foremost young art-film directors. With 1900, he attempted to address a wider public by embedding his themes in melodrama. The film was structured as a family saga, projecting a vision of Italian history as something formed by a...