Antonioni: I want to re-create reality in an abstract form. I'm really questioning the nature of reality. This is an essential point to remember about the visual aspects of the film, since one of its chief themes is "to see or not to see properly the true value of things."

Antonioni: The young people among whom my film is situated are all aimless, without any drive but to reach that aimless freedom. Freedom that for them means marijuana, sexual perversion, anything . . . What you get at the end doesn't interest me . . . It's that conquest of freedom that matters. The pursuit of freedom gives man his most exciting moments. Once it's conquered, once all discipline is discarded, then it's decadence. Decadence without any visible future.

Living among that youth, I had the precise sensation of entering a world which has finally put down barriers between individual and individual. You can speak with anyone of anything. No more taboo topics. I've talked with hundreds of young girls and boys who were seeing me for the first time. If one is used to smoking marijuana, he'll say so without fear. If a girl is frigid, she has no inhibition to admit it. This is a generation that has approached a certain individual freddom . . . and freedom from feelings too, because their sexual freedom, at this point, goes without saying. I don't know whether they can love the way we loved. They must suffer, I guess, but I'm sure they suffer for reasons very different from ours . . . never romantic . . . To live as a "swinger" . . . I think it means to take a leave from certain norms, certain traditions at any cost . . . But maybe it is also a legitimate way to get nearer a happier condition of life. Who can tell?

. . . . Love today is weaker, paler than in the past. When Soviet Cosmonaut Titov came back from his flight among the stars, he was asked by the press whether from the heights he had reached he'd once thought about his wife. 'No,' said Titov quietly before returning to live with her.