Agnes Varda Quotations

Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.

I'm not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman - not unless she is looking for new images.

I live in cinema. I feel I've lived here forever.

The story of a couple is always very fragile, especially over more than thirty years. People know it's not easy, and even though you have strong feeling and desire and endless love, it doesn't always happen.

I think I did fifteen long features and fifteen documentaries, or something like this, which is very little when you think of people making a film every year. Some people have done fifty or sixty films.

I waited for each film to become important for me. If I had no ideas for a film, I didn't do a film. So I made not that many films for fifty-four years of working.

I have respect for literature. If he found the words, if she found the words - this is a book!

It's a way of living, sharing things with people who work with me, and they seem to enjoy it.

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. I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that's it. I don't know why we should transform them.

At that time, when I started, in the '50s, cinema was very classical in its aims.

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 have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.

We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more. 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.

You are always in the world. Even in Vagabond. I am not on the road, I am not eating nothing. But in a way we all have a Mona. We all have inside ourselves a woman who walks alone on the road. In all women there is something in revolt that is not expressed.

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 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.

People think you are an orphan when you are a child, and don't believe that old people can feel that they are orphans.

You know, an hour and fifty-four minutes is too much for audiences. They get nervous.

Some people meet each other again only when I'm there!

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 know people could tell incredible stories. People have been in concentration camps, or women being raped, or a man going to war and not recovering from it. People have been robbed and beaten. A lot of people have had strong events in their life, which I didn't.

It's a way of living, cinema. And I see my family, I do this and that, I travel. It's a long process to let it happen.

You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn't need to have muscles.

I never fought, I never learned kung fu or boxing, I never went into these sportif competitions. I wouldn't cross the ocean. I think it's ridiculous to take such risk. But look, people love to do that. But I was not afraid of doing things I wished to do. I did not think that woman would be restrained. I never saw that, especially not in filmmaking, where you don't have to be strong.

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.

Sometimes I want to work with a DP, sometimes I want to work myself. I go to 35mm, 16mm, it's all the same, but it depends on what you want to tell and what are the tools you need.

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.

I just 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.

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, I don't do films pre-prepared by other people, I don't do star system. So I do my own little thing.

I should say nothing! I'm through with it! I hate to repeat myself all the time.

I go back to many films that I really love. 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.

If I was tall and blonde, I might have been a dancer or singer.

You have to invent life.

The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It's unbelievable. The film critics don't know my artwork and the art world doesn't know my films.

Society is so slow. A feminist is a bore.

I'm missing some people, you know, and this is not nostalgia. I miss them. This is melancholy.

I 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. Many filmmakers have made resurgent work, and I was just a little ahead of the time.

I made a braid because Chinese old people, they say that the God will take you by the hair to join you with - but God didn't take me, so I cut the braid.

I've changed my approach to people and to filming because of the new equipment, which is important.

The mirror is the tool of the one who wants to do a self-portrait. And if you want to make a photo you need a mirror.

I had a world. I don't think I had a career. I made films.

Sometimes I feel sad, but this is not nostalgia, because I don't want time to come back.

I hated myself totally white. So now I cheat. It's my white hair, and I put color there. My grandson says I'm punk.

I'm myself - knowing I'm doing a documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you. And they really gave me wonderful answers. We got along very well without trying to make me look like I'm what I'm not.

I had a very good time when I did The Gleaners - even though the people are poor, and I was suffering to see the conditions, and plus they are not such lovely hearts. They are tough to each other, they beat each other, they are rude and they are violent and they drink. They're not sweethearts, you know, but some were so interesting.

I think I got people confidence because I was not looking at them like insects that I would film.

I never met Publo Picasso. I took pictures at the Festival d'Avignon, but I was too shy to ask to go in his studio. It does not look like me now, but I was very shy, and shy of men also. I think there was a world that frightened me totally.

I thought, If I'm an ancestor and grandmother when I'm twenty-five, I should go peacefully to the real time when I'm an ancestor and a grandmother.

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. I'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.

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.

I 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.

I was eighteen, this was back in '46, so we also had these very frightening images of soldiers in the streets of Paris. So the effect of war, plus my shyness, plus my lack of education - I was afraid of men, really. It changes later, but it took me a certain time to adjust.

If you know nothing, it could be like an enemy in a way. I think that's the way I felt when I was young.

I'd been educated stupidly, I knew nothing about nothing, that's part of being shy.

The freedom he gave himself to work and change shape and change ideas and work all the time with joy, the joy of painting was in [Publo] Picasso, which I found beautiful.

The first exhibition [Publo Picasso] was organized by the communist party - because of his position during the war and all that.

[Pablo] Picasso really changed my life. It's strange to say so, but I started to see some Picasso paintings very early. I was very young, and he was not so much known.

I quit seeing some people who were saying bad things about women; I don't even want to meet them or see them.

I'm not nostalgic. My memories are back here in my mind.

It's peaceful to think about the family as a group. I totally believe in extended families.

Nostalgia 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.

I cannot say something different to one person and then another.

I 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.

I've always been like this - trying to find adventure where it's still in its first élan - the first spring.

I had flops, I had success.

I don't believe in inspiration that arrives like a bolt from the blue ... It seems to me that the more motivated I am by what I film, the more objectively I film.

I don't watch my own films. There is little time; I'd rather see another film.

You can buy a good pasta but when you cook it yourself it has another feeling.

I think we need to have a nest of something which is family.

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.

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.

Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer.

It's interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves - not so much to learn about me.

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!

Good cinema is good cinema. It makes you feel like you need to work. Just yesterday I saw a good film, but even if I'd seen a bad one, I'd feel, "Oh my god, what a bad job, I can do better."

My company is called Ciné-Tamaris, which is rosemary. That's my speed. Hot water and herb.

To change history is very slow. The first two times I came to the States - black people didn't have the right to vote.

When I did the first edit of Les plages, it was very dry and very square in a way. I was just saying the minimum. I said, Well, if this is the minimum, I don't make it. So I tried to make it more refined. 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.

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. I had beautiful jewelery around me, and when I lost I would take the jewelery and say, Service - being very generous, because it was very expensive jewelery. I would say, Tip.

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.

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!

There is a song of Gainsbourg that Jane Birkin sang, and the words are beautiful in French. It says, "Le jeu et les moi." It's impossible to translate, because it has a very nice sound. 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.

If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.

I'm trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me.

I call [ordinary people] real people, because they have in themselves an incredible treasure - stories, a way of speaking, a way of sharing, an innocence and a perversity which I find very interesting to discover little by little.

I tried to find a language for the film - not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain. 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.

I wanted to speak strongly about feminism in my life, since it's been a struggle.

The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .

This is all you need in life: a computer, a camera, and a cat.

An old woman I loved very much when I was young - the wife of Jean Villard - she's just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That's all she does - 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.

I'm still fighting. I don't know how much longer, but I'm still fighting a struggle, which is to make cinema alive and not just make another film.

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.

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.