Jason Anderson talks to the legendary French director regarding her autobiographical film The Beaches of Agnès.
What did you hope to share with people by making this film?
We do films to share not so much ideas as emotions or ways of looking at life. There is a common denominator in emotions. Even if my experiences are different or my love story is different, people can share something with me. It’s interesting work to tell my life story as a means for other people to relate to themselves. I’m not so special — I know people who can tell incredible stories, people who’ve survived concentration camps or women who’ve been raped or men who’ve been through war and never recovered from it. I had a life of work and emotions but nothing that could’ve traumatized me so much. I thought, “Is it interesting to tell?”
Yet you also became a photographer and filmmaker at a time when there were few opportunities for women. Didn’t that take courage?
When I started, I was sort of courageous because I didn’t think I should do less than my brothers did. I wasn’t courageous in terms of physical things — I wouldn’t cross the ocean in a sailboat or something risky like that. But I didn’t think that being a woman would restrain me, especially in filmmaking. When I did my first film in 1954 [La Pointe-courte], there were women directors in France — I think there were three. But they were really doing the same kinds of films that men were doing. What I wanted to do was different. It’s like when you want to jump and you put the bar very high. I thought, “I have to use cinema as a language.” When I saw what painting had done in the last 30 years, what writers like Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Faulkner or Hemingway had done, these people changed so much. When I started in the ’50s, cinema was just following the path of theatre, it was very classical in its aims. I thought: I have to do something that relates with my times.
Are you proud to have had the career you’ve had?
I don’t think I ever had a career. I never had a list of things I should do this year or next year. I never adapted anything. I waited for each film to become important to me. If I had no idea for a film, I didn’t do a film. So I didn’t make that many films.