Agnès Varda: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker Agnès Varda and friend.

Editor's note: "The Beaches of Agnes" opens in a limited run in New York and L.A. this week for Academy Award consideration. If you reside on either coast, do yourself a favor and run, don't walk, to "Beaches."

Agnès Varda Hits the BeachBy
Alex Simon
Born in Belgium in 1928, Agnès Varda is renowned for being the only female member of France’s legendary “Nouvelle Vague” (which also includes such luminaries as Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Varda’s late husband, Jacques Demy) school of filmmaking when, in 1954, she formed a film company called Cine-Tamaris for her first feature, La Pointe Courte. It earned her the title of “Grand Mother of the French New Wave,” at the tender age of 26.



Varda has made 33 films since then, alternating between shorts and features, fiction and documentaries. Some of her most famous titles include Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961), Le Bonheur (1964), One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977), Vagabond (1985), Jacquot de Nantes (1990), and The Gleaners and I (2000). Since 2003, Varda has completed two major video installations for the Venice Art Biennale and the Taipei Museum, as well as serving on the jury of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

Agnès Varda’s latest cinematic gem is the autobiographical documentary The Beaches of Agnes, in which Varda looks back upon the seminal experiences of her life: the people, places and films that shaped it. A fascinating blend of fact, fantasy and pure cinema, The Cinema Guild release hits theaters July 3. Still active as ever, the 81 year-old auteur sat down with us in the palatial Santa Monica home of friend and fellow filmmaker Zalman King to discuss her newest film, and remarkable life.

Tell us about how this film was born.Agnès Varda: When I saw that I was about to be 80, I saw that number flashing in front of me, when I was on a beach in Noirmoutier. I realized how many other beaches had influenced my life. These beaches are the thread through which I chose to describe, to friends, family, and others, some of my work and the events of my life. When you reach a certain age, many feel the need to recount their lives. It sort of came like bubbles, on the surface of the water. I wanted to be precise about not only my life, but how I structured some of my films, so five or six times I’ll stop to say how I made a film, and how that reflected on what was happening in my life at the time. It’s not enough to tell a story. You have to find a way to make it cinematic.

Varda on the beach in Belgium.

And you really blended reality with fantasy seamlessly.
Well, that is because of my love of the surrealists and their work, like the image of me in the belly of the whale. And I’ve always given myself the freedom to go from one thing to another: from documentary to fiction, short to feature, reality to fantasy, so I wanted to incorporate all of these aspects of myself into the film. Not all of it is to be taken seriously. It’s my life, and sometimes I enjoy, not laughing, but smiling at myself. It was difficult to complete as a film because I had to integrate so many different things, and then rediscover it all over again during the editing.

Did it take a long time to edit?
Yes, we were editing for a very long time. I wanted to be able to tell some stories, and entertain people, simple as that.

Varda poses with circus performers in The Beaches of Agnès.

One thing that’s fascinating to watch is how the world changed through your eyes. I’m thinking of your trips to China, to Cuba, and your film about the abortion issue, Once Sings, the Other Doesn’t. Did you have the same feeling when you reflected back on these times and these films?Oh yes, my God! You know, so many people said to me, “How could you go to Cuba?” But when I was there in 1961-62, it was the most exciting place politically on the planet. There was such an enthusiasm and passion, after being a bordello for America, Havana became this free city. It’s hard to understand now, fifty years later. But I was lucky to be able to have witnessed that, just like with The Black Panthers. I did a documentary about them, as well. The Party vanished, in a way, after two years, but at the time, they were very strong in their vision of what they wanted to achieve. I was in China during the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, in 1957. China wasn’t even accepted by the United Nations then. It didn’t even exist in the economic market. Can you believe it, when you see what’s happening there now? As far as the subject of abortion goes, there used to be groups of women who would go to Amsterdam to get abortions, because the Church had such a strict hold over society in France, for so many years, even into the ‘70s. There was such a stigma, and a shame attached to it. It’s remarkable the changes I’ve seen over 80 years, some for good, some not.

Jacquot de Nantes must have been a very personal experience for both you and Jacques Demy. What was it like making that, with Jacques?Well, he knew he was dying when we did it. He didn’t have the strength to do it himself, which is why I directed it. It was an interesting experience making a film about somebody else’s childhood, almost like approaching a mystery, in a way. This is the part that can escape you, in a way, when you’re with someone for many years. So entering his childhood with his complicity, and his agreement, was an incredible experience. So my films have always been vital experiences for me. That’s why I made a career of it. Each film was born from a specific reason, bad or good, but growing organically.

Varda and her husband, the late Jacques Demy.

What was it like in with this film, to view your own life as a spectator, the same way you did with Jacquot?
It’s funny, one day I was filming my hands, and I thought, instead of ‘Oh, my hands look so old, with spots, I thought, that’s a beautiful landscape.’ It’s another aspect of being a filmmaker: my own age, my own life, becomes a landscape.

Was it difficult directing yourself, or could you just tune out when the camera was on you and “act”?
I was very conscious of the fact that there was a camera, and I was being filmed, and it was a very organized shoot, with shots either accepted or not by me. Two women were the cinematographers on this film, one in France, one in the U.S. for the Los Angeles sequences, and they were both wonderful, which helped a great deal. So no, it wasn’t hard. It felt quite natural after a time.

You and Jacques came to the U.S. at the height of the anti-war and hippie movement, in 1967. What were your impressions of that time in America, compared to what was happening in Europe?
It was right before the ’68 movement, which now everyone knows about and romanticizes. But in ’67, France was really dull, and being in America, it was like this shower of freedom, counterculture, the way people spoke and dressed. There was all this loving and all these “happenings,” all these meetings, picnics with people, sharing things. It must be difficult for you to image how it was. It was so open, like everybody should love everybody. Even the studio people were wearing peace and love signs on the lapels of their suits. (laughs) I don’t know that they knew what it meant, but everybody had to be “peace and love.” It was really nice, and we were so delighted to be sharing in that at that time in our lives when we were about 40. It’s an age in which you can still discover new things, have an open mind, and not be stuck in a routine. I hope the film shows that. I made a film during that time, a hippie Hollywood film.

Agnès Varda, circa mid-1960s.

One thing you touched on regarding that time was how different it was trying to work within the American studio system compared with the freedom you had back home in France. Could you speak about that?
My friend had written a screenplay called Peace and Love, and the studio accepted the screenplay, but wouldn’t give me final cut. I was stupid. I should have said yes, and then asked to do a cut for Europe, or just for France. I was too stubborn. I should have made the film, and then negotiated, but sometimes we make mistakes. It was a subject I really liked and related to. I still relate to it now. (laughs) I tried another with EMI, with a step deal, and they called it off, ten years later. So who knows, maybe I would not have been so happy inside the system. So the films I did make here, that were completed, were made with French money and total freedom.

Jacques made The Model Shop around that time, for Columbia Pictures. Was he frustrated by it all, as well?He wasn’t frustrated. He just wouldn’t play the game. He didn’t want to have a crew of 70 people in a parking lot shooting two people sitting in a car. He’d shoot it hand-held with a crew of maybe five or six people. He could have done a big musical, with a big crew. He had done Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort back in France, both muscials. The Model Shop is a beautiful film, but it’s a French film, not a Hollywood film. For some reason, he just turned his back on the system, and what was proposed to him.

It’s also a rather humorous side note that Jacques wanted to cast a young unknown named Harrison Ford in the lead…
Yes and the studio said they didn’t see anything in him, and the film would make no money if he was cast! (laughs) Harrison was nice enough to appear in Beaches and talk about this. But looking back, I think Jacques wished he would have done things differently. So when you ask what’s it like to look at myself, I ask the question ‘Maybe I should have done this differently here,’ but I didn’t do it, and life is what we did and what we do, not what we wish we had done.

Can you talk a bit more about the metaphor of the beach for the way you look at your life?
I think because growing up, when I was born in Belgium and then we moved to the south of France, my parents always took us to the beach. Jacques and I would always go to the beach. I’ve never been into surfing or swimming, or beach sports of any kind, but the beach itself is something that has always drawn me in. Full or empty, the beach is a beautiful landscape: the sky, the water, and the earth. You can understand the whole world there, as a landscape.

Sandrine Bonnaire and Varda on the set of Vagabond (1985).

I also thought it was an interesting metaphor, because the beach is where everything begins and everything ends, an appropriate place to be if you’re looking back over the seminal moments of your life, right?Yes, it is true. I made a film called Vagabond. At the beginning, Sandrine Bonnaire comes out of the ocean, naked, and little by little she gets dirtier, and dirtier, and suddenly she’s full of mud, so it’s also a metaphor, as you say, for the beginning of the world, which is also so indifferent to us.

Corinne Marchand in Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961).

Something else you’ve always done is play with the concept of time in your films, which you do in Beaches, and you’ve done going back to Cleo from 5 to 7.
Cinema is light and time. We know that. The time element is the one you work on, the one you play with. Then you have the other aspect, which is duration. Time and duration, and they’re not the same. To tell a story with film, you must know the difference.