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 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 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.

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."

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.

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 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.