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!
AGNES VARDAI 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.
More Agnes Varda Quotes
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I 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.
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I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.
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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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I think I got people confidence because I was not looking at them like insects that I would film.
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I never fought, I never learned kung fu or boxing, I never went into these sportif competitions. I wouldn’t cross the ocean.
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The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It’s unbelievable.
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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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Sometimes I say, If I had seen some masterpieces, maybe I wouldn’t have dared start. I started very – not innocent, but naïve in a way.
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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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I’ve seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don’t do commercials,
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Sometimes I feel sad, but this is not nostalgia, because I don’t want time to come back.
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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 don’t watch my own films. There is little time; I’d rather see another film.
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It’s nice to think that we have in ourselves the energy. It’s somewhere, but it’s sleeping sometimes. I try to wake it up when I need it.
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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 VARDA