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 VARDAWhen 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 VARDAThe film critics don’t know my artwork and the art world doesn’t know my films.
AGNES VARDAI’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.
AGNES VARDAWhen 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.
AGNES VARDAI’m sure they learn a lot, and some of them, it makes them aware of what they wish to do. I was – that’s the way I was – autodidact.
AGNES VARDAIt 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 VARDAI had a world. I don’t think I had a career. I made films.
AGNES VARDAI 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.
AGNES VARDAI’ve always been like this – trying to find adventure where it’s still in its first élan – the first spring.
AGNES VARDAYou have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn’t need to have muscles.
AGNES VARDAI 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.
AGNES VARDAI’m trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me.
AGNES VARDAI’m not nostalgic. My memories are back here in my mind.
AGNES VARDANostalgia 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.
AGNES VARDAI need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That’s what I try to do all the time.
AGNES VARDAWe need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more.
AGNES VARDA