Bertolucci's The Dreamers is inspired by the 1968 Paris riots

The 63-year-old singled out Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson and Harmony Korine in an interview printed in Friday's Daily Telegraph.

"They show me that to be alive and making movies means to try and reinvent cinema each time you make a film," he said, adding: "I'm very optimistic."

Bertolucci's controversial new film The Dreamers opens in the UK in February.

The Italian director, who shot to fame with his contentious 1972 film Last Tango in Paris, said he was surprised at reaction to The Dreamers, about a US student who forms a relationship with a French brother and sister in 1968 Paris.

"It has caused more controversy than I expected or even wanted," he told the Telegraph. Bertolucci had heated discussions with studio Fox Searchlight over cuts it wanted to make to the sexual content of the film.

Radicalism

"If these cuts happen the movie will lose some of its commercial impact and strength," he said after a screening in Venice last year.

He said the film was an attempt to show the radicalism he had grown up with in the 1960s.

"One of the reasons I decided to go ahead with The Dreamers is I wanted to tell one thing to the kids of today," he said.

"In 1968 we'd go to sleep at night, knowing we 'd wake up not in tomorrow but in the future. We hoped that soon the world would be different."