What matters to me is that the feeling excited by my films should be universal. An artistic image is capable of arousing identical feelings in viewers, while the thoughts that come later may be very different. If you start to search for a meaning during the film you will miss everything that happens. The ideal viewer is someone who watches a film like a traveler watching the country he is passing through: because the effect of an artistic image is an extra-mental type of communication. There are some artists who attach symbolic meaning to their images, but that is not possible for me. Zen poets have a good way of dealing with this: they work to eliminate any possibility of interpretation, and in the process a parallel arises between the real world and what the artist creates in his work.

What then is the purpose of this activity? It seems to me that the purpose of art is to prepare the human soul for the perception of good. The soul opens up under the influence of an artistic image, and it is for this reason that we say it helps us to communicate - but it is communication in the highest sense of the word. I could not imagine a work of art that would prompt a person to do something bad. There can be no talk of art in relation to films like The Exterminator. My purpose as far as possible is to make films that will help people to live, even if they sometimes cause unhappiness - and I don't mean the sort of tears that Kramer vs. Kramer produces. Perhaps you have noticed that the more pointless people's tears during a film, the more profound the reason for the tears. I am not talking about sentimentality, but about how art can reach to the depths of the human soul and leave man defenseless against good.

Andrei Tarkovsky
from an interview with Ian Christie (1981)