.

To be honest, in making my first [feature] film I had another objective: to establish whether or not I had it in me to be a director. In order to come to a definite conclusion I left the reins slack, as it were. I tried not to hold myself back. If the film turns out well, I thought, then I'll have the right to work in the cinema. Ivan's Childhood was therefore specially important. It was my qualifying examination.

All this is not to say that I made the film as a kind of unstructured exercise, merely that I tried not to hold myself back. I found myself having to rely on my own taste and have faith in the competence of my aesthetic choices. On the basis of making the film I had to establish what I could count upon in future work, and what would not stand the test.

Now, of course, I hold different views on many things. Afterwards it became clear that little of what I discovered actually had life in it, and I have since abandoned many of the conclusions I reached then.

Andrei Tarkovsky
from Sculpting in Time