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.
I was a photographer first.I worked alone. I did it my way as much as I could. I have been sort of courageous about doing things, because I didn’t think I should do less than my brothers.
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.
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.
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.
I was nineteen and I put a bowl on and I said, Cut around! Because it was not the fashion at the time when I did that hairdo – and I kept it all my life!
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!
I 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.
I think people should be different. I love people who don’t go by the rule that you have to be careful because you’re old, you have to do this and that, you have to eat this and that.
