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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.
Agnes Varda -
I'd been educated stupidly, I knew nothing about nothing, that's part of being shy.
Agnes Varda
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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.
Agnes Varda -
Some people meet each other again only when I'm there!
Agnes Varda -
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!
Agnes Varda -
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.
Agnes Varda -
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.
Agnes Varda -
You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn't need to have muscles.
Agnes Varda
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It's a way of living, sharing things with people who work with me, and they seem to enjoy it.
Agnes Varda -
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.
Agnes Varda -
I think I got people confidence because I was not looking at them like insects that I would film.
Agnes Varda -
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.
Agnes Varda -
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.
Agnes Varda -
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.
Agnes Varda
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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.
Agnes Varda -
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.
Agnes Varda -
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.
Agnes Varda -
Sometimes I feel sad, but this is not nostalgia, because I don't want time to come back.
Agnes Varda -
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.
Agnes Varda -
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.
Agnes Varda
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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.
Agnes Varda -
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."
Agnes Varda -
I had flops, I had success.
Agnes Varda -
I'm not nostalgic. My memories are back here in my mind.
Agnes Varda