Gleaning is getting things that are abandoned. I did not abandon my early pictures, my photos, my early films. It’s just going through my body of work as something I can pick from.
I wanted to catch the problem of consumption, waste, poor people eating what we throw away, which is a big subject. But I didn’t want to become a sociologue, an ethnographe, a serious thinker. I thought I should be free, even in a documentary which has a very serious subject.
I’m myself – knowing I’m doing a documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you. And they really gave me wonderful answers.
To share a lot of ideas – not ideas – emotions, a way of looking at people, a way of looking at life. If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator.
I’m interested in people who are not exactly the middle way, or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away.
With Jane Birkin, we had a scene from a film called Jane B. by Agnès V. – a portrait I made in ’87. We had a casino scene, surrealistic, in which we had some naked people gambling. Jane Birkin was the card dealer and I was the player.
I was nineteen and I put a bowl on and I said, Cut around! Because it was not the fashion at the time when I did that hairdo – and I kept it all my life!
