I don’t try to make a place in history at all! People put me in the history of cinema because my first film, La pointe-courte, was so ahead of some other filmmakers.
I think the digital cameras have changed my view. Even though sometimes, including the installations that I show, I mix 35mm filming and video handmade.
When I did the first edit of Les plages, it was very dry and very square in a way. I was just saying the minimum. I said, Well, if this is the minimum, I don’t make it. So I tried to make it more refined.
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!
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.
Even Vagabond – it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.
