Interview by Sheila Heti for "THE BELIEVER" Mag

“I NEED IMAGES, I NEED REPRESENTATION WHICH DEALS IN OTHER MEANS THAN REALITY. WE HAVE TO USE REALITY BUT GET OUT OF IT. THAT’S WHAT I TRY TO DO ALL THE TIME.”
People who star in Agnès Varda’s films:

People who may have cancer
People who are drifters
People who collect trash
Her husband
Herself

Agnès Varda is sitting in a hotel room during the Toronto International Film Festival, and there is a photographer looming in the corner. She doesn’t want him to shoot while she is talking—she insists he do it now. “Don’t take pictures of the others, please! Make no mistake which one is me,” she says. “We have a brunette, here. A blond. You have the choice. Oh my god. Move back!” she cries. “You have a telephoto! Why do you need to be so close? It’s like a gun!”

Six journalists sit around, drinking tea and coffee, all poised to interview her at once. She asks a newspaperman, “Did you get the press kit? It is full of information. You could even invent that you met me. Say, ‘We were in a little room. She had the light behind her because her eyes fear the light. And we had tea and coffee.’”

This interview is invented; many of the questions are made up. Of the questions that are asked here, I did not ask them all, but the answers are always Varda’s own. She was not interested in speaking to each reporter individually, and since her latest films, in particular, are more interested in the feeling of truth than the truth, there is no reason for me to argue with her method. I hope this interview conveys at least the feeling of the truth of speaking with Agnès Varda, if not the literal truth of the situation
. In 1954, Varda established herself as a significant figure in French cinema with her first film, La pointe-courte, only partly because it had come from a woman in her mid-twenties with no film training.

It melded documentary footage of fishers in a fishing village with a somewhat melodramatic fictional love story about two young city-dwellers for whom the fishing village is mere setting. It is considered the first film of the nouvelle vague, and was followed by the magnificent allegory of beauty and death Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962). Recently, her four most beloved films were collected in a Criterion box set that shows her mastery, her sensitivity, her imagination and range. These include La pointe-courte, Cléo de 5 à 7, Le bonheur (1965), and Sans toit ni loi (1985).

Her most recent film, Les plages d’Agnès, is a collage self-portrait of her passions through eighty years of life, the material for which includes her past films, images from art, footage with friends,some invention, some fact. Her films have, from the beginning, encompassed many genres and none.
—Sheila Heti

I. “YOU HAVE TO BE STRONG TO BE A CARPENTER, MAYBE,
BUT THE DIRECTOR OF A FILM DOESN’T NEED TO HAVE MUSCLES.
THIS IS WHY I DIDN’T KNOW WHY I COULDN’T DO IT.”

AGNÈS VARDA:I should say nothing! I’m through with it! I hate to repeat myself all the time. I cannot invent totally. I cannot say something different to one person and then another. I cannot make it totally different each time, you know. I say so much in the film and so much even in the press kit! I quoted Montaigne. So I would say, can we have subsidiary questions, or side questions? Can we speak about the weather? Or the tennis that I watch in my room?

THE BELIEVER: It’s so nice to see that you have had the same haircut always, because I’ve had the same haircut all my life, and I always try to change it but it’ll never change.

AV: I remember when I tried it. I was nineteen and I put a bowl on and I said, Cut around! Because it was not the fashion at the time when I did that hairdo—and I kept it all my life! At the time of Cléo I grew it a little more, and when Jacques died I grew a bit here. [She pulls out a strand.] I made a braid because Chinese old people, they say that the God will take you by the hair to join you with—but God didn’t take me, so I cut the braid. Now it’s the same hairdo but it has two colors—come on! It’s different! It’s like an ice cream of chocolate and vanilla! I tried a wig. 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. I tell you—better they laugh about their grandmother than think she’s a bore. Some grandmothers are really boring! They ask, Ah ha ha—did you do this?—be careful—put your sweater on! C’est ça. So, in a way, we try to please them somehow.

BLVR: You had a remarkable career in an age when women didn’t have careers—

AV: I had a world. I don’t think I had a career. I made films.

BLVR: Yes, it would be odd, thinking of cinema as an extension of life as you do, and at the same time thinking of it as a career or trying to make a place in history.

AV: I don’t try to make a place in history at all! People put me in the history of cinema because my first film, La pointe-courte, was so ahead of some other filmmakers. Many filmmakers have made resurgent work, and I was just a little ahead of the time. It happened because of La pointe-courte, which is a very strange film, but very daring for ’54

BLVR: How did you get started?

AV: I was a photographer first. I went alone to China—not alone, I was in a group, but I worked alone. I did it my way as much as I could. I have been sort of courageous about doing things, because I didn’t think I should do less than my brothers. But I wouldn’t be courageous in terms of a physical thing. I never fought, I never learned kung fu or boxing, I never went into these sportif competitions. I wouldn’t cross the ocean. I think it’s ridiculous to take such risk. But look, people love to do that. But I was not afraid of doing things I wished to do. I did not think that woman would be restrained. I never saw that, especially not in filmmaking,where you don’t have to be strong.You have to be strong to be a carpenter maybe, but the director of a film doesn’t need to have muscles. This is why I didn’t know why I couldn’t do it.
 
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. 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. Theater! I mean, psychology and drama and dialogue and making sense! At that time, when I started, in the ’50s, cinema was very classical in its aims, and I thought, I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.
 
BLVR: Differently in what way?

AV: When I did Cléo, I thought, I have to work with time. We feel time differently when we are suffering or are in pain or we are waiting for something. So subjective time became the subject for me—plus the duration of the time of the film that the spectator perceives. I worked with matters that are there for any artist to work with, but which I worked at with cinema.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 have respect for literature. If he found the words, if she found the words—this is a book! Bien! I didn’t think I should do a career by picking this or that. I waited for each film to become important for me. If I had no ideas for a film, I didn’t do a film. So I made not that many films for fifty-four years of working. 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.
 
BLVR: The way you made Les plages d’Agnès can be seen as a kind of gleaning—you found material that already existed to put in your film. It is almost like you were looking into the ground, bringing up images from the past, from old films you had made, and photographs, and scenes from the films of your late husband, Jacques Demy.

AV: But 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—I pick this and that and that. It’s like I had a collection of my work and I could choose this one or this one. 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. Now, I just take this piece of film, and I make a narration in Les plages where I say I’m losing. I say that I lost my father. We are watching the roulette ball, and the ball stops and I say, That is where it fell—and he died. He lost, he fell, he died. Which is a totally different use of the same images. That was my game. And it works. You can have seen Jane B. or not.

II. “THE STORY OF A COUPLE IS ALWAYS VERY FRAGILE,
ESPECIALLY OVER MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS.”

BLVR: Is each film a game, then, in some way? Is every film like you’re making a different game for yourself to play?

AV: Well, 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.

BLVR: You also brought in images of people from your past, like Harrison Ford. Is he a friend of yours?

AV: I never met him since he became so famous-famous. But yes, he came to the opening of Vagabond in Los Angeles. Whenever we meet he is very friendly, but, you know, these people cannot even be reached! If I knew how to reach him—I went to the country in his house where we shot in the winter, and he told for the camera the story that the studios told him, when he was young, that he had no future. Can you believe this? And that is nice to put in a film, because it is a real story in itself, so interesting.

BLVR: I read in a book where somebody said that your Los Angeles was so different from the way other people lived in L.A., because you and Jacques created a little Paris around you, with friends and food, and it was so different from the alienated Los Angeles that other people were living in.

AV: Some people meet each other again only when I’m there! Sometimes it’s like, Eh! I haven’t seen you since the last time Agnès made a little—it’s people I put together because I have been always liking them and loving them and seeing them. Jacques was invited by Columbia, and we had that incredible life. At the time I made some films. I made Lions Love and Black Panthers. I worked all the time. Then we came back ten years later with Mathieu as a child, but Jacques was not really finding a deal. I tried with the studio—but it didn’t work. I made a documentary about a woman that my son, Mathieu, acted in.At the time, Jacques and I were arguing, and when I show this in Les plages, I use that beautiful Picasso painting called La femme qui pleure. What a painting—so strong!

At that time I was down because I was so much hoping—and so was Jacques—that we could go on forever. We were disappointed more than anything. More than separated, we were disappointed. I think it’s something I can tell. 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. Then we came back together back in Paris. So I tried to find a language for the film—not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain. I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That’s what I try to do all the time.
 
BLVR: Yet it feels more like life actually is—

AV: I hope it does. Because I think that’s what we need. 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.
 
BLVR: You used to make fictional films. Why don’t you make fictions anymore?

AV: I’m not sure I’m in the mood for that. I’m trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me. 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. With The Gleaners, the problem was bigger than me. I wanted to catch the problem of consumption, waste, poor people eating what we throw away, which is a big subject.

But I didn’t want to become a sociologue, an ethnographe, a serious thinker. I thought I should be free, even in a documentary which has a very serious subject. It made me feel very good that I could investigate a certain way of doing documentaries in which I’m present—I’m myself—knowing I’m doing a documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you. And they really gave me wonderful answers. We got along very well without trying to make me look like I’m what I’m not.
 
BLVR: How did you gain their trust?

AV: I think I got their confidence because I was not looking at them like insects that I would film. We sat down and we spoke. But Les plages is a different film, because the subject is not bigger than me. The subject is the small me, if I may say so.

BLVR: Does it feel different to make something more documentary than something more fictional? Does one make you feel more a part of the world?

AV: You are always in the world. Even in Vagabond. I am not on the road, I am not eating nothing. But in a way we all have a Mona. We all have inside ourselves a woman who walks alone on the road. In all women there is something in revolt that is not expressed. 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.

BLVR: Your speaking of people being pushed away reminds me of a scene in Les plages where you and your brother hold hands and face the camera and walk backward. You walk so slowly, so carefully, with half smiles, almost like children. It’s so moving.

AV: Yes, because people think you are an orphan when you are a child, and don’t believe that old people can feel that they are orphans. But maybe I will take it out from the film. You know, an hour and fifty-four minutes is too much for audiences. They get nervous. I try to make it one hour forty-five.