I met Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage the second day after I arrived, you know. I had never seen or heard of Brakhage. For me, it was a revolution, because I was well educated in film, but American-style experimental film was known to me in the abstract, and I had seen practically nothing. I had seen a film then that Noël Burch had found and was distributing called Echoes of Silence. It was a beautiful film, three hours long. It goes forever and it was in black and white, very grainy, and I saw that film and I thought...it was not New Wave. It was really a new concept of cinema.

I'm really interested in experimental works, so the people that I admired the most was Dziga Vertov, Sergey Eisenstein, people from the '20s. Also, I loved John Ford and his westerns. The New Wave was not tender to women.

What interested me in film was the image-making aspect of it. So, I went to school in cinematography. I was really convinced that image was what I wanted to do, and I think it came from the fact that I lived in a small town my whole life, but my mother was very interested in painting, so she would bring us to Paris for two weeks. So, we're going to the Louvre and to the museums and to see shows. In the evening we were seeing theater. Painting is basically what led me. I think the image was key.

When the cinematography school told me I would have no chance to get a job, I said, "It's irrelevant." My mom was a feminist in the '20s. She taught me to be on my own, to be independent, to do what I wanted to do. I did not believe it would be difficult. It was difficult. In '66, I almost starved for a year and a half, and the only way I did not starve was because I could not find a job in camera, but I found a job in editing.

We had been affected by the fact that the film world was a man's world in Europe as much as here, in America actually.

It makes no sense to bad mouth people, but I think Jean-Luc Godard is astonishing as a survivalist, somebody who can do a film that is as extraordinary as Goodbye to Language.

I felt it was really important to come here to see what was happening in New York. So, I came to see film and accidentally I stumbled upon theater, so I discovered Andre Gregory, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, and theater became my first anchor.