Agnes Varda Quotes

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

The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror.

You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .

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.

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."

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Society is so slow. A feminist is a bore.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 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!

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.

Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.

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 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 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.

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

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

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

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