I didn’t go to film school. I was never an assistant or trainee on a film. I had not seen all those cameras. So I think it gave me a lot of freedom.
AGNES VARDAI didn’t have a list of things I should do this year, next year, find a good novel, sign two stars and make a deal – because I think cinema should come from cinema.
More Agnes Varda Quotes
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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.
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Good cinema is good cinema. It makes you feel like you need to work.
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I’m not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman – not unless she is looking for new images.
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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.
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Some Bresson, some Godard of the early times, the Cassavetes of those years I love. And the early Wim Wenders. But my own films I don’t watch, unless I need them.
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You have to invent life.
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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.
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I think I got people confidence because I was not looking at them like insects that I would film.
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When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It’s like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high – you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.
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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.
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I’m not nostalgic. My memories are back here in my mind.
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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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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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I should say nothing! I’m through with it! I hate to repeat myself all the time.
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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 wanted to speak strongly about feminism in my life, since it’s been a struggle.
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It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction.
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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.
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I’m still fighting. I don’t know how much longer, but I’m still fighting a struggle, which is to make cinema alive and not just make another film.
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We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more.
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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.
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I think it’s ridiculous to take such risk. But look, people love to do that. But I was not afraid of doing things I wished to do.
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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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I tried to find a language for the film – not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain.
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I was free always. I could work without the money, to film this and that. But this is another point, because now I’m alone, and I can just use it when I want.
AGNES VARDA