I don’t see any difference between Oedipus and Medea; I don’t see any difference between Accattone and Medea, any difference between The Gospel and Medea. In reality a director always makes the same film, at least for a long period of his life, just as a poet always writes the same poem. These are variations, even profound ones, on a single theme. And the theme, as always in my films, is a type of ideal and ever unresolved relationship between the poor and the common world, let’s say the sub-proletariat, and the educated, middle-class, historical world. This time I have dealt directly and explicitly with this theme. Medea is the heroine of a sub-proletarian world, an archaic and religious world. Jason is instead the hero of a rational, lay, modern world. And their love represents the conflict between these two hemispheres. It’s an old polemic of mine: the centre of the petit bourgeois civilisation is reason, while everything that is irrational, for example art, challenges bourgeois reason. Power, in fact, is based on reason. Naturally, this being a relatively stratified work, there are other "meanings" to be found, for example a love story... Still, I must say that in the choice of this tragedy of "barbarisms" in which we see a mother kill her children for the love of a man, what fascinated me most was the excess of this love. In a certain sense, with Medea I wanted to show –in a manner that was absolutely fanciful, mythical and narrative– exactly this: the indelible violence of irrationality. Sometimes I write the screenplay without knowing who the actor will be. In this case I knew it would be Maria Callas, so I tailored my writing to her. She had a great effect on the creation of this character… The barbarism, deep inside, that comes out of her eyes, her features, is not shown directly. She belongs to a rustic world, Greek, agricultural, and was then brought up for a bourgeois culture. Thus, in a certain sense I tried to concentrate the entire complexity of Medea in character.

Pier Paolo Pasolini
Le regole di un’illusione,
Rome, Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1991

Euripides’ Medea is two hours of very heavy tragedy. Pasolini had an extraordinary idea, one I really liked: there is a barbaric Medea and a Greek one, the dream and the reality. [...] This is more modern; one gradually arrives at the true tragedy after the halfway point because there is a framing on the mythology and legend that is very meaningful. On the other hand, we mostly constructed the character together, partly to adapt to today’s requirements.[...] On stage I had to use a movement of the hand to express the fact that Medea was not Greek, an uncivilized and harder gesture: in the cinema this problem doesn’t exist; everything is briefer and curtailed. I’ll tell you even more: even on the stage I have always sought intensity, the essentiality; I didn’t have any particular problems: intensity and essential movements, I could afford to use a gesture only when it was truly called for. A useless gesture is a foolish gesture. [...] I hope I was successful in bringing out Medea’s humanity as much as possible, even though there is very little in the legend. There’s more wickedness… perhaps I’m a bit at odds with Pasolini, but I want more of the goodness of the character, I go beyond her unpleasant aspects.

Maria Callas
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Medea,
Milan, Garzanti, 1970