The Pleasures of Existence: Interview

Agnès Varda, La Pointe Courte (still), 1956.

This week, we are delighted to present an interview with Agnès Varda, conducted by Aline Desjardins in Montréal in 1973. Transcribed, translated, and introduced by Conall Cash for Film Notes, this interview is published here for the very first time.

In 1973, Agnès Varda had already gone through many stages and transformations as a filmmaker. Making her first feature film before the explosion of the French new wave, she would make one classic new wave film (Cléo From 5 to 7, 1962) before making such mature and still to be fully appreciated works as Le bonheur (1964). Moving to California in the late 60s, she began to make films which, in her words in the interview presented here, broke fundamentally with a “French classicism” of narrative economy. Often incorporating a mixture of fiction and documentary, Varda here likens these then-recent films like Nausicaa (1970) to children’s “surprise bags” which solicit a sense of wonder and curiosity, rather than one of unity and completion. In this interview with Aline Desjardins on the island of Saint Hélène in Montreal, Varda reflects on this trajectory in her work—which she refuses to consider as a “career”—in relation to her personal history and her engagement in the feminist movement. Through this discussion that is at once personal, artistic, and political, what emerges perhaps most of all is the extent to which Varda is motivated by a seeking of the good life, in the relations we take up with others and towards ourselves. Her incessant desire is to create a cinema that works to conjure this good life—a vocation of cinema, against many of the uses to which it has been put, kept alive by what she here calls “that great international mafia of people who love cinema.”

—Conall Cash

Aline Desjardins: Agnès Varda—is that your real name?

Agnès Varda: Yes—stupidly real. My father’s name was Varda. He was Greek—and ashamed of it. He had the “rug salesman complex.” But he wasn’t a rug salesman at all. You know, there are people who are ashamed to be from the Middle East. So, he didn’t raise us as Greek children, but as French children.

AD: And your mother was French?

AV: My mother was French.

AD: And you lived your whole childhood in Brussels?

AV: No, we came to Sète, on the Mediterranean.

AD: But that was later, when you were eleven or twelve?

AV: Yes, but you know, for me, it doesn’t count, the time before that. This whole thing with early childhood… Well, there are people who are deeply inspired by their early childhood. It’s certainly true, as Freud says… it can be true. But for me personally, it’s of little importance. I don’t make films with a lot of flashbacks. For me, conditioning, imagination… our problems don’t all find their origins in childhood. I have the sense that I began to live in Sète. It’s a port city, between Marseille and Spain. It was beautiful! There were canals, little boats, we were always crossing bridges. It’s a little like Venice, but ugly. A kind of Venice of the poor. It’s magnificent, a very mysterious city, because there’s nothing to see, so the charm comes from something else. There’s nothing to look at.

AD: And your whole family moved there—what exactly was the whole family?

AV: There were five of us kids, and my mother, who very courageously took care of us alone through the whole of the war. I felt my mother’s energy, and her presence, more than that of my father, who wasn’t really there.

AD: You were the oldest?

AV: No, not at all, I was in the middle. It was a bourgeois family, in terms of social position, taste, opinion. And that bored me. At the same time, I didn’t have political ideas, because you don’t when you’re seven or eight. My early childhood, I experienced it as a complete bore which I had to escape from as quickly as possible. And in Sète, I made lots of friends, I had fun. I loved it—I went fishing, I loved the water. But you know, the Freudian thing—when people talk about your early childhood, they try to make you say something [that reveals]—“Ah! That’s why she’s a filmmaker; that’s why she’s crying; that’s why she’s smiling.” Now, I can’t say I know it well—I don’t have a philosophical mind, I don’t read Freud, I don’t read Jung, it’s not my thing. But I’m anti-Freudian. Psychoanalysis—the method is wonderful, but all psychoanalysis is based on the idea that women are men who are lacking, that they lack the penis that would make them a man. And that always made me laugh, because I always felt glad to be a woman. I always thought that it was a tremendous good fortune to be of the female sex, to have the possibilities of a woman. I never thought I was a man lacking something. I always thought I was what I was.

AD: But—if I may be a little Freudian—is that because your mother played the role of the head of the family?

AV: Not at all! Not at all. I had a very “Eastern” father. He was really the head of the family, even a little tyrannical. I don’t have a strong mother at all, I would say that I have a mother who’s courageous, but soft, traditional. A very soft, charming, calm woman, who obeys her husband. It’s not at all because of that. On the contrary, I simply thought that it was great to be a girl, because you have all the same possibilities as a man, plus the possibility of having children. To me that’s a plus rather than a minus.

On my arrival in Paris, I held onto the feeling of being a provincial girl, with strong roots outside Paris, who hates Paris, who suffers a lot because of Paris. I was melancholic for at least four or five years. I did a lot of things, but I always missed those large spaces, and the water, like everyone who lives in a port town. Being a student is a very rich time in your life, but at the same time, it’s a time of preparation for something else. I was entirely conscious of the fact that I was studying in order to do something afterwards—I didn’t know what. I wasn’t someone for whom filmmaking was a vocation. Since I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I worked hard, while telling myself, “It’ll come.” I was impatient just to know what I wanted. As long as you haven’t decided what you’re going to do, you’re a bit disengaged.

AD: But you did meet a man who was important to your intellectual orientation—Bachelard.

AV: Oh, you read somewhere that I liked Bachelard. I never met him, never spoke to him. But I had him as a professor, at the Sorbonne. First of all, he was beautiful: this amazing old man with a huge beard, a beard out of a fairytale, very long and curly. His gaze was extremely soft, like an old wise man, extremely kind. What he did, essentially, was the psychoanalysis of materials—psychoanalysis of water, of fire; reveries of repose.1

He taught classes where he would speak about attics, or about basements… or about dough. He spoke of such real things that touched me very much. He tried to understand, in a subtle and profound way, the things we touch, the things and places around us. He spoke about houses, about air, about running water, a woman’s relationship with water—all these images. He demolished symbolism as a literary school, and returned it to being a school of living. Now that’s magnificent.

AD: And, personally, perhaps it was Sète that he gave back to you?

AV: He gave me back Sète, yes, but above all he gave me the desire to give things visibility, as if I could make visible the things that we can touch and feel.

AD: But that’s not what made you catch the bug for photography and cinema?

AV: Not really, I didn’t think about it at the time. The pathways of self-consciousness are bizarre. I didn’t think about it—I listened to Bachelard, and said to myself that it was wonderful. But I never spoke with him, I never even did one of his exams. But out of all the things I studied, the rest seemed to me completely foolish. I went to classes while telling myself, “What are we talking about? Who is this speaking to? What is it for?” I didn’t have the courage [to rebel], because at that time there weren’t many dropouts, people who would say, “Screw the classes, let’s go.” I pursued my studies without really knowing why. That’s why Bachelard seemed to me something really thunderous.

Later, when I thought it would be better to do something practical, I chose photography, because I said to myself: “You touch the negative, you develop the photos, you enlarge them, you touch the camera, you see people, you talk to people.” So, I became a photographer, by saying to myself that it was a really lively job. And I became a theater photographer, thanks to Jean Vilar, from Sète, my hometown. He started the Avignon Festival, he was totally unknown, and no one had any money. They paid for my trip and expenses on the condition that I help out. So I did all sorts of things—I was stage manager, I took water to the residences, I played the guitar offstage during the monologue from Richard II, I painted the curtains, I did everything I could do, as well as photography.

AD: You felt good in your own skin.

AV: I felt good in my own skin—I was happy, I did things, I had the sense of being in real contact with people. And when my first photos appeared in the theater magazines, I was proud, like all beginners. I felt absolutely exalted. And then, little by little, I became a photographer. When Vilar founded the TNP, the Théâtre National Populaire (National Theater of the People), in Paris, with Gérard Philippe, I became its official photographer, and I did that for ten years. Even when I became a filmmaker, I continued to be their photographer, since cinema doesn’t pay the bills.2

AD: But the move from photography to cinema, did that seem natural?

AV: No—I was a photographer, and I wrote a film. This first film, it’s called La Pointe Courte. I wrote it in ’53, twenty years ago. I wrote it in the way you write a poem that you’re going to put in a drawer and that no one will read. I never thought about either making the film or having it appear on screen. I didn’t go to the cinema, anyway. I think that up until the age of twenty-five, I’d seen five films. The Pointe Courte, the location, was not only something I knew, but it was a place that inspired me. I’ve always begun my films by being inspired by places that are so strong, I have the impression that they give me the idea to make something. So it was the Pointe Courte, this place, which gave me the idea of making the film, a film that wouldn’t just be about the place, but about a range of things.

AD: The film was edited by [Alain] Resnais, I believe?

AV: I wrote my film, with absolute precision, drawing all of the shots. I was like all non-professionals—in a sense they are ultra-professional. They envision everything before starting. So I wrote my film completely, exhaustively. But I wasn’t an editor. It was shot with a young crew, including girls, all of whom were quite inexperienced—except for one, Carlos Vilardebó, who was my assistant. It’s really thanks to him that I was able to make the film. So then the film had to be edited. I had thirty hours of footage. I asked Alain Resnais, who I didn’t know at all, and who was an editor—he’d only made some short films, editing was his job at that time. So it was normal to ask him to edit a film.

AD: But for you, with La Pointe Courte, did you have the sense of, “I’m beginning a filmmaking career”?

AV: Not at all. I don’t believe in careers—even now, I don’t have a “filmmaking career”. Even the word “career” I don’t like. No, it was a film. And Alain Resnais had the extraordinary talent and wisdom to say to himself, “It’s a strange film, and a slow film. It should be edited as it was written.” He didn’t make use of his extraordinary skill to make a brilliant edit of an awkward film. On the contrary, he was completely modest, he tried to let the film keep its personality, for what that was worth. He tried to give it the right rhythm. I learnt to edit with him, you could say.

AD: And what effect did it have on you, to see La Pointe Courte signed “Agnès Varda”?

AV: It’s not a matter of signing. It had a great effect on me to see that I’d made a film. I was very struck when people said, “You have to show it”—I’d thought it would never leave my home. Afterwards, there was Cléo From 5 to 7. It’s the story of a very beautiful, very blonde singer, who realizes that she has cancer. She’s afraid, and because she’s afraid, she thinks about herself and redefines herself. Well, after that, I got heaps of proposals to make films about beautiful, sick women—Marilyn, another singer who dies… But I don’t want to repeat myself. Then there was Le bonheur. A couple—a man and a woman—plus another woman. So, after that, I got all sorts of fantastical proposals, for films about adultery, about “throuples,” three women, two women… If you make two bucks with a topic, the producers and distributors are ready to give you money to do it again. That’s why I say that I don’t want to make a career. I could have made a career, but I never wanted to, it doesn’t interest me.

AD: Because you want to choose your films?

AV: I want to search, to keep searching. In my head, I’m always searching for something. I’m always putting in question my relationship to cinema, and therefore putting in question the cinema that I’m capable of making. When I made Lions Love in Hollywood, it was completely different from all my other films, because I’d discovered America, hippies, pop music, showbiz, the madness of Hollywood, which is marvelous. The palm trees, the heat, these totally crazy houses, kidney pools, broken mirrors… It made me insanely happy! And all of a sudden, that French good taste, with its proper measure, that whole education, it all seemed to me a complete bore. I said to myself that I needed once and for all to escape from classicism. Even in Le bonheur, there is this French classicism. What a load of shit! I was sick to death of it.

AD: And yet, you came back.

AV: I came back to France, but I’m no longer classical, I can’t do that anymore. My films now are bazaars, dossiers, surprise bags. I can’t go back to the form—perhaps I’ll come back to it—the classical form of the story: it begins, it continues, it ends. I made a film called Nausicaa—a kind of dossier on the Greeks. I don’t know how to describe it. It talks about the Greeks, and about the coup d’état; it tells the story of a girl named Agnès, who is eighteen. Perhaps she’s me when I was eighteen, but at the same time I’m her mother. I talk about my father, I talk about tourism in Greece, I talk about politics, and then there’s some theatre… I no longer want to make “serious,” classical films. I want to make things that are like those kids’ surprise bags, where you open it up and there’s a bunch of things inside, and maybe it makes you think, maybe it makes you laugh, maybe it interests you, maybe you think about something. I made this film about the Greeks, Nausicaa, which French television paid for, but courageously doesn’t want to show… (Laughter) because all of a sudden they realized that you can’t sponsor a film against the colonels and sell planes to the colonels at the same time. The film I wanted to make about women, it was a musical—I wanted to make a “Women’s Lib Show.” A musical in the Hollywood tradition—descending a stairway, with feathers, and boas.3 Instead of singing those classic stupid songs, like “I’m Waiting For my Man,” “I Belong to Him,” there were things that were sung in reverse, you could say. You know the eternal feminine? We spoke of the eternal feminine, but in a different way. There’s a lot to be done with women, I think women are the first to work on. They have to change, they can’t avoid it. The image of woman in cinema has to change.

I like home life, if it’s joyful. The idea of a house, for me, it’s like a place, an intersection. This means that two people, the two adults—because it’s normally two adults who create this place—assemble around them enough movement of people who come, who can talk, who can rest, who can make phone calls, who can sleep, who can eat. Even in Paris, I talk a lot with the people from my street. I live on the ground floor. We don’t shop in the American style, buying everything for the week in one big shop. We’ll go out to buy something four times a day. We’ll go out for three eggs, then later for bread, then for meat. It’s certainly not rational, in terms of—what’s the word—management?4 Something like that. You could say that the organization isn’t good, but the contacts you make with people are fun. I like picnics, too, eating on the grass.

AD: Your husband doesn’t like that so much, I think?

AV: Eating? Yes, he does.

AD: No, picnics.

AV: No, he doesn’t really like putting his bum on the grass. Still, you can’t look for a husband by asking: “I’m looking for a man who likes picnics.”

AD: Like a classified ad.

AV: You know, “the ideal man,” that whole idea is always based on stupid things. But, my husband—he makes films, his name is Jacques Demy. He’s kind, he’s good to live with, he’s talented. What can I say? We get along well. I think he loves me because I make him laugh.

AD: But he’s not interested in feminist questions?

AV: Why would he be? He’s not a woman.

AD: But it concerns men.

AV: Oh, they’re not interested, frankly—apart from two or three sympathizers, who have a kind of temptation for heroism. Today, the only men who are interested in feminism are heroes. This kind of tender hero, those sweet men who think that things really must change. But if you look at things in general, men are completely uninterested for the moment. As long as women haven’t changed their way of being, their structure, and what they want, it’s not so clear that men should be obliged to accept feminism. Right now, I don’t think it interests them.

AD: But is it important that you both do the same kind of work? Would it be possible for you to live with someone who doesn’t do what you do?

AV: Certainly, if I loved them. I’d like to live with a painter, because they’re calm, and quiet, and I like the smell of paint, and they never have problems with shooting. At the same time, it’s nice to talk about work, in a relaxed, easy way, and watch films together. If I lived with an engineer, who was always going to scientific conferences, I’m not sure what I’d do. When we go to film festivals, we both have the same reason for going, the same taste for watching films, and mostly the same friends—that great international mafia of people who love cinema. We find them everywhere, they’re our mutual friends.

It makes me sweat to talk about couples.

AD: And yet you’ve made films about them.

AV: Ah, yes. Well, the couple is a very important social concept. So, obviously one has to confront this concept—to refuse it, to accept it, to play with it, to laugh about it. The social couple is a kind of horror, because it means marriage, it means being locked up and bored out of your mind, it means limiting yourself. Most of the time, it means killing the flourishing of the other person. Even in a couple which tries not to do that, it’s the great handicap—you risk stifling the personality of the one you live with.

AD: But how do you manage not to do it?

AV: I don’t know if I manage it! Maybe I stifle Jacques Demy, maybe he stifles me, I don’t know. What I mean is that it’s extremely difficult. Demy has a very strong filmmaker’s personality, very different from mine. I adore his films, but I’m incapable of making them—either of imagining them or of making them. It’s absolutely distant from my mental world. And the reverse is true: he watches my films, I think he likes them a lot, but he doesn’t know where they come from. We never really tried to understand each other in terms of explanations of what we make, or of our personalities. I believe that, between people, you have to communicate, but not necessarily understand. I’m not sure that we can understand another person. And most of the time, men are completely incomprehensible for women, and vice versa. I think we shouldn’t make ourselves suffer over the limits of comprehension. At the same time, I think you have to push, and to find means of communication, which sometimes take place through comprehension, but sometimes by a thousand other means. These can be all kinds of relations—sexual relations, vibrations…

AD: Silences?

AV: …silences, the joy of being together. All the things that can be shared. The pleasures of existence, which are enormous, varied. I think it’s very sad that we only speak of pleasure in relation to sex. I think there are tremendous pleasures in existence which are the things that we have to share, in the sense of a happiness shared with others, and particularly with the person we live with.

AD: And you have to accept to not understand.

AV: Yes, that part’s hard. When I was young, I wanted to understand. I would have liked to speak in order to understand, I thought that words were always the key. Of course, words are one means for understanding, but not always the right one—words have their limits, and then the vocabulary one uses is also sometimes a source of misunderstanding. So, words are limits. Explanations are limited. For me, it’s like that, to love is to see how someone lives, to love how they live, to try to completely love the way someone lives, what they have to do, and to find pleasure in that. Because there’s a pleasure in that, exactly like that of seeing children grow up, and seeing their personalities flourish.

AD: But how did you manage to accept to not understand?

AV: Because I suffered so much when I was twenty from not understanding others. I thought that, man or woman, I wanted to understand—really, I wanted to be them. Essentially, the desire to understand is a desire to be the other person. I want to be so much you that I can understand you. But I can’t be you, it’s impossible. We want to lose our brains so that we can become someone else, but it’s impossible, and we suffer too much. I suffered a lot when I was twenty, twenty-five. And afterwards I told myself that there’s something marvelous, on the contrary, in saying, “I’ll never understand, and so I’ll always be so thirsty for this knowledge that I’m going to look at everything around me.” This thirst, it becomes a form of love, a form of attraction towards others. I find that interesting. It gives me the idea that love can never be boring.

For the past three years, I’ve wanted to make a film about contraception. Stories of abortions, the laws about it in France, etc. It’s been hell. I can’t find any money. The French are absolutely allergic to this kind of topic, they don’t want to hear about it, it’s appalling. When I see the struggles here [in Canada], the laws changing in America, I find it [the French attitude] revolting. And we struggle in France. There was a trial in Bobigny, a girl who had an abortion at sixteen and was arrested.5 So we had a protest. My stomach was huge, it was three days before I gave birth, and I was shouting: “We’ve all had abortions, arrest us!” It was great. She was acquitted. So it’s true that, when we have an action about a single case, we win. But we don’t manage to get the law changed. We’re about to win this amazing thing—we’ll have the right to have an abortion when we’re in danger of dying. A nice present. Obviously, it’s a joke. So, they’re under the impression of being tolerant, that they’ve changed the law, but it’s a joke.

AD: You’re very concerned by these questions.

AV: I’m very concerned because I believe it’s important for women to be able to choose maternity. Their whole lives, their whole destiny is linked to that. Do they want children or not? How they want them, when they want them, and how they’re raised. It’s there that society—Canada or any other society—hasn’t resolved the problem. The education of children poses a dramatic problem for women who work, because they’re split in two.

AD: But you were faced with this problem. How do you resolve it? You have two children?

AV: I have a grown daughter who’s fifteen. I raise my daughter, I try to. I say to her that it’s important to be someone who stands up and looks at the world, with skills, an ability to support yourself, and to know how to live alone. A woman should know how to live alone. A woman should know how to behave, how to pass a day, an evening, and a night alone. That doesn’t mean she has to choose to live alone.

Even if you don’t accept it, society obliges us to play a number of roles, including that of the bride, that of the housewife, and that of the mother. These roles don’t bother me that much. Especially that of the mother, which I like a lot. But, these roles eat up half my time. And since society isn’t organized differently, at this time I’m not able to change all that. There is no destiny of a woman—a woman isn’t born to have children, she isn’t born to do the dishes. I’m speaking of my case, and it’s a privileged one, I don’t live my life with my hands in dishwater. I don’t cook all that much. At the moment, specifically for the first six months of the baby’s life, I can’t shoot. I find it hard to write, because writing isn’t something you can do in between two or three other things. It requires a concentration of mind, the time to think and to read. To be specific, the last three months of my pregnancy and the first six months of the baby, I did nothing, in terms of work. That poses a huge problem. When I shoot, I bring the children, it’s such a joy to be in the midst of it all, I like for everything to be mixed together. That’s why I shoot a little at home, I want to be able to do everything at the same time.

AD: But it’s a privileged job.

AV: I do it in a privileged way. By which I mean, little by little, every time I made some money, I put it into that. It’s not a question of comfort; it’s part of my comfort, the comfort corresponding to the work I do, and in connection with the life I want to lead. A good couch doesn’t seem that important to me, but to have an editing suite where I live, or books, or to have a kitchen big enough so that we can all eat, and feel good together, so that if we’re at the table we can talk, spend a whole evening around the table, having an interesting conversation that comes up naturally from this setting, while the water’s boiling, or while the soup’s being made. That’s my way of living; it’s not applicable to everyone, because you have people who are poorly housed, who have much more serious financial problems than I do now, for whom there’s a constant division—getting up early, taking the kids to crèche, running to the studio, coming back, going to the next place. It’s really difficult—a woman who has children, and who works, today, it’s like she has two lives, like she’s a “superwoman,”6 she has to tackle life on two fronts. That’s how it is as long as things aren’t organized differently. And for things to be organized differently, it’s not only a question of daycare, crèche and all that. It has to be done differently—I think it will happen, with community houses, where several couples live together, with several children, with people looking after everything, the children of the house, the means of the house. Until we accept the idea that people need to be together, so as to take on problems together, I don’t think women will really be able to work.

AD: What is a woman filmmaker?

AV: For me, a woman filmmaker is a woman who expresses through cinema—if she has the opportunity to learn it—the things that pass through her head, her heart, her spirit. It’s a woman who tries to share with the people she knows, and then with a larger and larger public, and also with women specifically, what a woman can express. Now, what a woman can express, it’s something I’ve thought about, and it’s something that has changed for me. I first started thinking about making a film when I was twenty. For me it was a matter of making a film, expressing myself, doing something. I didn’t ask myself feminist questions at all, when I started in filmmaking—I made films. And then there was the French New Wave—I found myself part of the New Wave, and I asked myself questions about cinema, because the New Wave redefined cinema, we could say. So I made Cléo as part of that whirlwind, and even Le bonheur. And then I asked myself about the question of inspiration, and so I made Les créatures.

And then I discovered America, and at the same time, women’s issues. It all came at once. The disorder, the struggle against culture as a solid foundation, all of that I put in question. Then all of a sudden, the position of women in the world, the image of woman in cinema, that I also put in question. If I hadn’t been raised the way I was… You know, I was rebellious—I was a rebellious little girl, a rebellious youth, and a rebellious woman. But inside all of that, I was “educated.” Since I was little, I was brainwashed constantly, with my mother saying, “There’s nothing so beautiful as having a child,” “Nothing so beautiful as loving one man all your life.” That’s brainwashing, that’s education, that’s culture. Literature is full of sentimental stories, where women faint from happiness, from love for a man. And even in a more advanced literature, which shows women discovering sexuality. We’re always in the same basket, which is to say, there’s this vague idea in the back of the mind that the key thing for a woman is happiness through love. Here, a film like Le bonheur is too ambiguous. Even though I show clearly that what is expected of a woman, a woman in the home, is that she does the ironing, that she puts the children to bed, that she makes the meals – in other words, her function is completely replaceable. Any woman can replace any other woman for that. That’s what appears in Le bonheur. In terms of function, as long as there’s someone taking care of the two kids, be it one woman or another, it’s of no importance. But the film is very ambiguous, because it describes with happiness a happy and egotistical man. Women may think that it’s a defense of men. But I don’t know why we should systematically attack egotistical men, since they were taught to be like that. They have to be taught differently.

AD: It’s cultural, then?

AV: It’s cultural—boys need to be raised differently, men have to be talked to, to try to get them to live differently. But you can’t systematically reproach a man for that, because he was raised that way. Today, we women filmmakers—and more me than others who are younger—we make cinema with mental images. We choose things, out of all the things there are in the world, on the basis of certain schemas. And these schemas are the mental images that we project onto the screen. And these images were taught to us by a male culture, meaning that we’re still playing the game of men, with the images of men. And that’s very important for women filmmakers, to try to invent images, and a vision, and to make this vision available to be shared. A vision that is truly feminine, which is to say that it draws upon the profound energy of woman, not necessarily in relation to man.

AD: So, there are feminine images in the cinema?

AV: It’s not that, it’s a general vision of existence which will gradually be brought into cinema. As you well know, there are two clichés of woman in the cinema. I’m exaggerating a little, but it’s the nun or the whore. And then you have variations. The nun is also the soft, blonde, talented woman, or it can be the mother. The whore can just be the woman who gets men’s attention, it can be the coquette. So there are these two schemas—there’s nothing in between. When you see a woman working on screen, you always see a woman with a more or less meaningless job, and you don’t actually see her working. For example, she’s a decorator, and you see her making two or three things at her window. Or she’s a writer, and you see her writing in her little corner. Or maybe she has a job and we see her a little at her workplace. But you rarely see a woman on screen whose work has a place in her life of the kind you see with men on screen. You can make a film about a man of science, and you see his work, his research. You could make a film about an explorer, or an airline pilot. In such films, you see that the essence of their energy consists in confronting the problems of their professional life, and resolving them. And then maybe love comes, or maybe it doesn’t. But you don’t see films whose topic is: a woman confronts her professional problems, and resolves them. You don’t see that. Now, why do I say this? Maybe it annoys men. But it annoys women to see a woman on screen in the midst of all her romantic adventures. I think that it’s very important not to think that the goal for a woman is love, and happiness through love. I think we’ve overvalued love, in a terrible way. Today, girls are completely trapped in it.

AD: To the detriment of their happiness?

AV: Yes, it’s that—happiness isn’t love. Sometimes happiness comes through love, quite often. Love is a catalyst of many things which result in happiness. But you can’t set off with the idea: “I’m going to be in love, and I’m going to be happy.” I think that’s a catastrophe. Marriage isn’t a goal, marriage is to be put completely in question. I think that today there’s a generation of girls who are in the process of discovering that they can love what they do, that they can love life, feel good, for instance by counting a great deal on friendship, not necessarily with men, but friendship with other girls. Then, eventually, they can have very good relations with men, which eventually result in love, and in living together. That’s a kind of present, a bonus, but I don’t think you should start with that.

Québec, 1973