People like my films. They understand me through my films; it’s like a connection that has been established between all my work and myself and the audience and the viewer.
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.
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.
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.
To share a lot of ideas – not ideas – emotions, a way of looking at people, a way of looking at life. If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator.
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.
