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.

The experimental film scene was very much misogynistic as well. I don't know if you have read what little attention was given to the films of Joyce Wieland, who was the wife of Michael Snow. Michael was the "genius" and she was not. If you look at the films they're wonderful, but very different. Michael was very proud of the films too, so it was not coming from him. It was coming from the general environment. I think both Chantal Akerman and I shared that. We wanted to find a language, which was the language of 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.

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'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.

1968 in Paris renewed my options. There was suddenly a desire of inventing new things, and I while I was working as an editor, the assistant editor thought I had a gift, and when he shot his own film, he hired me as his assistant camera, and I trained myself to do the light for him.

In the '60s when I started to see everything I could see, you could see pretty much everything which was still available from the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, and therefore I had an education which was really large and vast in different cinema. That's probably the reason I did not fall for the New Wave. It's really the love of the movies that made me want to become a cameraperson, definitely. I was really a film buff.