The filmmaker looks back at his work while exploring new realms.

Bernardo Bertolucci doesn’t like looking back.

“I like looking in front of me. I see a mysterious landscape I don’t understand, but then cinema is a kind of mutation,” the director says of his romantic, mystical passion for films and filmmaking.

He will be saluted tonight by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a screening of a restored print of one of his finest films, “The Conformist” (1971), which in turn launches a Cinecitta International/UCLA Film Archive-sponsored Bertolucci retrospective.

“A retrospective forces you to be responsible for what you’ve done. It’s a very heavy feeling,” Bertolucci said in an interview Wednesday in his West Hollywood hotel suite. “When I’m forced to look at a movie I did 25 years ago, like ‘The Conformist,’ it’s not so bad because it’s like looking at a film made by somebody else. And I am in a sense somebody else. I’m not the same man I was 25 years ago. I really don’t like looking at my recent films because I always want to change something.”

The 55-year-old director, whose films include “Before the Revolution,” “Last Tango in Paris,” “1990” and “The Last Emperor,” says he wants each of his movies to be different from the others.

“Very often people . . . want you to repeat yourself, and my mission in life is not to repeat myself. So after my three exotic Oriental movies [“The Last Emperor,” “The Sheltering Sky” and “Little Buddha”] I had a strong desire to go back to Italy to do a little light thing, ‘Stealing Beauty.’ When people told me that the film didn’t seem like me I took it as a compliment,” he says.

“I can see an itinerary in going back. I lived the full experience of the New Wave. Cinema was a question of life and death for me. But by the end of the ‘60s I needed feedback. My films had been ‘monologues,’ now I wanted to make ‘dialogues,’ ” he says.

“I also felt a desire to be more international. Cinema, more than any other form of art, is classless: The audience sitting in the dark looking at images is one class and is international. When I looked at ‘Last Tango in Paris’ with my writer and editor I thought, ‘Oh my God! It’s too tragic, too sad.’ It was impossible to predict its worldwide success.

“When you work with Marlon Brando you discover what is beyond the great actor is something else--a man who is so omnivorous in his curiosity it’s contagious. His questions force you to be as curious as he is. It was an incredible lesson--and I was attempting to take off his Actors Studio mask.

“About a year ago we were talking up at his house--I had not seen him in a long time.

“We were so greedy to talk to each other we sat there--3 p.m., 7 p.m., 8 p.m.--it got dark, but we didn’t stop to turn on the lights. At a certain point I said, ‘Do you agree that I got something of you in the film?’ He said, ‘Do you think that man up there on the screen is me? Ha! Ha!’ There will always be another ‘beyond’ with Brando. Doing ‘Last Tango’ was an initiation into adulthood. I was dealing with an American icon--the American icon.”

Bertolucci feels strongly that directors influence one another to the extent that when asked about who influenced him, he rattles off his short list: Godard, Ford, Renoir, Mizoguchi, Rossellini, Fellini. Bertolucci abandoned his studies at Rome University in 1961 to become an assistant to Pier Paolo Pasolini on Pasolini’s first film, “Accatone.”

“I like movies which go out of control--it’s like the cinema itself is taking over,” he says. “If a director is so brave as to give up some control, it’s fantastic! There is also a moment of megalomania in directors, and it happened with me in ‘Last Tango,’ ” he says. “Then I did ‘1900.’ Can you believe I really thought that film would be a bridge between the U.S. and the USSR? It came out broken and in pieces--[“1900” was severely cut but later restored]. I realized that all the omnipotence I felt I had on ‘Last Tango’ was an illusion.

“In the ‘80s I thought I couldn’t work in my country, which had become a place of total political corruption, but I went back when the country became more attractive again,” says the Italian director, who with his wife, filmmaker Clare Peploe, has residences in London and Rome.

“I spent two years in preparation for ‘The Last Emperor’--I did not want the Chinese to find me making mistakes. In the East it’s considered ‘Gone With the Wind.’ I think the young Chinese directors like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou were encouraged to make not only little neo-realist movies but also to be more ambitious.

“In fact Chen Kaige [who would later make the epic-scale “Farewell, My Concubine”] told me so. To discover other countries apart from the suffocating, heavy world mono-culture is so important, but 10 years after making ‘The Last Emperor’ I’m afraid of seeing what has happened in China.

“Every movie which is not consecrated in this country has very little space here and all over the world,” he says, proposing that American movies playing abroad pay “a little toll” into a fund to keep the European cinema alive.

“The majors are always curious about my movies, and then they ask, ‘What’s that? Is it worth it to spend $10 million on prints and advertising?’ Maybe not--and it gets sent to the cemetery of cinema, television. Cinema is a collective experience in the theater. You have to see a picture in a dark theater with other people! Electronic images do not have the weight of screen images. What you see on TV are the ghosts of movies.”

Nevertheless, Bertolucci is thinking of making the plunge into television with a sequel to “1900,” which ended in 1945. “I don’t think the possibilities of TV have been fully explored,” he says. “And I’m always doing movies that people say take twice the time that they should.”

* “Stealing Time: The Films of Bernardo Bertolucci” begins Saturday at 6 p.m. in UCLA’s Melnitz Theater with the restored, 355-minute “1900” (1976). Information: (310) 206-FILM.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Bertolucci on Film The retrospective feting director Bernardo Bertolucci kicks off today with a screening of “The Conformist” (1970), at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theater, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, at 8 p.m. Bertolucci and UCLA Film Archive director Robert Rosen will be on hand for a discussion following the screening.

The series will continue on Saturday at 6 p.m., and thereafter, at the UCLA Melnitz Theatre with the 5-hour, 55-minute version of “1900” (1976). Bertolucci and his longtime collaborator, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, will be on hand to introduce the film. The rest of the schedule:

* Sunday at 7 p.m.: “The Grim Reaper” (1962), “Partner” (1968) and “Agony” (1967).

* Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.: “Before the Revolution” (1964) and “Luna” (1979).

* Thursday at 7:30 p.m.: “The Spider’s Stratagem” (1970) and “The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man” (1981).

* Oct. 26 at 7:30 p.m.: “Last Tango in Paris” (1972) and “The Sheltering Sky” (1990).

* Oct. 27 at 2 p.m.: “Little Buddha” (1993). At 7 p.m.: “The Last Emperor” (1987).

For tickets: (310) 247-3600.