Agnes Varda Quotes About Film
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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. I started totally free and crazy and innocent. Now 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.
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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, I don't do films pre-prepared by other people, I don't do star system. So I do my own little thing.
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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.
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I'm not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman - not unless she is looking for new images.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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!
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You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn't need to have muscles.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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."
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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. I think the digital cameras have changed my view. Even though sometimes, including the installations that I show, I mix 35mm filming and video handmade.
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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. 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.
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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 had a world. I don't think I had a career. I made films.
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