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.

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.

At that time, when I started, in the '50s, cinema was very classical in its aims.

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.

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

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.

I thought, If I'm an ancestor and grandmother when I'm twenty-five, I should go peacefully to the real time when I'm an ancestor and a grandmother.