I went at 4:30 in the morning to a cafรฉ 500 meters from my place. And it was another city... Totally different than where I go every day. And I said, "God, I will do that again." That's another subject I want to do. It's my street, suddenly different at 5:00 in the morning. I can shoot for one week. That's enough to make a movie.
Chantal AkermanFirst I went to a Jewish school, when I was very little. But when I was 12, they put me in a school with a lot of traditions, and they were educated people and they were talking about Greece and the Parthenon and I don't know what. All the kids, all the girls they had already seen that and knew that from their family, and I would say, "What are you talking about, what's that?" It's not my world. My grandparents were very well-educated people, but in the Jewish tradition. They knew everything about the Bible.
Chantal AkermanThe jail thing is very, very present in all of my work... Sometimes not very frontally. The jail is coming from the camps, because my mother was in the camps, and she internalized that and gave it to me.
Chantal AkermanWhat I hate in movies is all those people you need. And then I realize I do better when I shoot by myself.
Chantal AkermanHave you seen the film Histoires D'Amรฉrique? It's also a mixture of humor and monologue, and it shows how the Jewish humor comes from drama and tragedy.
Chantal AkermanDelphine Seyrig is a very proper woman, from high society. She's from the Ferdinand de Saussure family, the structuralist. Old money. Swiss. Protestant. They were that type of well-educated people who could recognize a good artist before others, and she was like that. Even if it was against something inside her. Tell me one actress in 1972 in France, except Delphine, at her level, who would love Hรดtel Monterey. No one.
Chantal Akerman