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.

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

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.

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.