I'm missing some people, you know, and this is not nostalgia. I miss them. This is melancholy.

Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer.

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

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.

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

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