In my films I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don’t want to show things, but to give people the desire to see.
AGNES VARDAWhen 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.
More Agnes Varda Quotes
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Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer. Women have to make jokes about themselves, laugh about themselves, because they have nothing to lose.
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My company is called Ciné-Tamaris, which is rosemary. That’s my speed. Hot water and herb.
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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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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 tried to find images, allegorical images, that I could use to express things that I didn’t want to say or didn’t want to show or I was not able to find how to show.
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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 don’t watch my own films. There is little time; I’d rather see another film.
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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.
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People know it’s not easy, and even though you have strong feeling and desire and endless love, it doesn’t always happen.
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She almost doesn’t recognize her children, but she recites Valéry and Baudelaire. So what? We’re the ones who are suffering. She’s not.
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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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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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I see all these students, and I admire them – they’re trying to learn something, they go to school, they do film school, they go on shoots, they help.
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Society is so slow. A feminist is a bore.
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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.
AGNES VARDA