The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .
AGNES VARDAWith 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.
More Agnes Varda Quotes
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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.
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When I started I did not know I wanted to be a filmmaker. I started – I made a film. Then when I finished I said, Oh my god it’s so beautiful – I should be a filmmaker!
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When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done – people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway – in France we have Nathalie Sarraute – and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater.
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Society is so slow. A feminist is a bore.
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It’s a way of living, sharing things with people who work with me, and they seem to enjoy it.
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I don’t believe in inspiration that arrives like a bolt from the blue … It seems to me that the more motivated I am by what I film, the more objectively I film.
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To change history is very slow. The first two times I came to the States – black people didn’t have the right to vote.
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You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn’t need to have muscles.
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I didn’t see films when I was young. I was stupid and naïve. Maybe I wouldn’t have made films if I had seen lots of others; maybe it would have stopped me.
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There is a song of Gainsbourg that Jane Birkin sang, and the words are beautiful in French. It says, “Le jeu et les moi.” It’s impossible to translate, because it has a very nice sound.
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I’m missing some people, you know, and this is not nostalgia. I miss them. This is melancholy.
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If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.
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Nostalgia doesn’t make sense, because it’s like bringing the memories back to be a special part of my day or to be part of my week. And I’m inside my memories the same way I’m inside my everyday life.
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I try to do nothing. I drink rosemary when I have a lot of work to do. People take coffee, they take speed, whatever. I take rosemary.
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I wanted to speak strongly about feminism in my life, since it’s been a struggle.
AGNES VARDA