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.

[Pablo] Picasso really changed my life. It's strange to say so, but I started to see some Picasso paintings very early. I was very young, and he was not so much known.

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.

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 had a world. I don't think I had a career. I made films.

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.

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.