Agnes Varda Quotes

I quit seeing some people who were saying bad things about women; I don't even want to meet them or see them.

I'm not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman - not unless she is looking for new images.

This is all you need in life: a computer, a camera, and a cat.

My company is called Ciné-Tamaris, which is rosemary. That's my speed. Hot water and herb.

I think we need to have a nest of something which is family.

To share a lot of ideas - not ideas - emotions, a way of looking at people, a way of looking at life. If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator.

I hated myself totally white. So now I cheat. It's my white hair, and I put color there. My grandson says I'm punk.

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.

I see all these students, and I admire them - they're trying to learn something, they go to school, they do film school, they go on shoots, they help. I'm sure they learn a lot, and some of them, it makes them aware of what they wish to do. I was - that's the way I was - autodidact.

It's a way of living, sharing things with people who work with me, and they seem to enjoy it.

Sometimes I feel sad, but this is not nostalgia, because I don't want time to come back.

I was free always. I could work without the money, to film this and that. But this is another point, because now I'm alone, and I can just use it when I want. I think the digital cameras have changed my view. Even though sometimes, including the installations that I show, I mix 35mm filming and video handmade.

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."

I didn't have a list of things I should do this year, next year, find a good novel, sign two stars and make a deal - because I think cinema should come from cinema. I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that's it. I don't know why we should transform them.

I didn't go to film school. I was never an assistant or trainee on a film. I had not seen all those cameras. So I think it gave me a lot of freedom.

Nostalgia doesn't make sense, because it's like bringing the memories back to be a special part of my day or to be part of my week. And I'm inside my memories the same way I'm inside my everyday life.

I don't watch my own films. There is little time; I'd rather see another film.

I didn't see films when I was young. I was stupid and naïve. Maybe I wouldn't have made films if I had seen lots of others; maybe it would have stopped me. I started totally free and crazy and innocent. Now I've seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don't do commercials, I don't do films pre-prepared by other people, I don't do star system. So I do my own little thing.

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.

When I did the first edit of Les plages, it was very dry and very square in a way. I was just saying the minimum. I said, Well, if this is the minimum, I don't make it. So I tried to make it more refined. I tried to find images, allegorical images, that I could use to express things that I didn't want to say or didn't want to show or I was not able to find how to show.

You can buy a good pasta but when you cook it yourself it has another feeling.

Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.

I had a very good time when I did The Gleaners - even though the people are poor, and I was suffering to see the conditions, and plus they are not such lovely hearts. They are tough to each other, they beat each other, they are rude and they are violent and they drink. They're not sweethearts, you know, but some were so interesting.

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.

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

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.

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

When I started I did not know I wanted to be a filmmaker. I started - I made a film. Then when I finished I said, Oh my god it's so beautiful - I should be a filmmaker!

Sometimes I want to work with a DP, sometimes I want to work myself. I go to 35mm, 16mm, it's all the same, but it depends on what you want to tell and what are the tools you need.

I never met Publo Picasso. I took pictures at the Festival d'Avignon, but I was too shy to ask to go in his studio. It does not look like me now, but I was very shy, and shy of men also. I think there was a world that frightened me totally.

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

[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.

It's a way of living, cinema. And I see my family, I do this and that, I travel. It's a long process to let it happen.

If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.

I'd been educated stupidly, I knew nothing about nothing, that's part of being shy.

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.

I'm interested in people who are not exactly the middle way, or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away.

I had flops, I had success.

People like my films. They understand me through my films; it's like a connection that has been established between all my work and myself and the audience and the viewer.

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.

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.

Society is so slow. A feminist is a bore.

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.

If I was tall and blonde, I might have been a dancer or singer.

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 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.