quarta-feira, novembro 04, 2009
“You have a telephoto! Why do you need to be so close? It’s like a gun!”
“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.’”
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?
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.
I had a world. I don’t think I had a career. I made films.
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 think I’m on the way. I have to do it the way she did. She told people, Don’t worry if I say it wrong—I’m allowed to do so. My sister was suffering from it. She said, It’s terrible—she gives us the names of her brothers and sister! I said, But she’s free, let her enjoy that—and I laughed. And I teach my children, who were there, laugh! I mean, she does nothing wrong. She’s liberated from truth, in a way, from being right.
An old woman I loved very much when I was young—the wife of Jean Villard—she’s just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That’s all she does—she almost doesn’t recognize her children, but she recites Valéry and Baudelaire. So what? We’re the ones who are suffering. She’s not.
Well, Picasso really changed my life. It’s strange to say so, but I started to see some Picasso paintings very early. I was very young, and he was not so much known. The first exhibition was organized by the communist party, can you believe this?—because of his position during the war and all that. But the freedom he gave himself to work and change shape and change ideas and work all the time with joy—you know, the joy of painting was in Picasso, which I found beautiful.
You understand, I was eighteen, this was back in ’46, so we also had these very frightening images of soldiers in the streets of Paris. So the effect of war, plus my shyness, plus my lack of education—I was afraid of men, really. It changes later, but it took me a certain time to adjust, yes.
People are four years older and they know much more than you, and they’re both very bright, and Renais told me a lot of things. In the editing he told me I should maybe see films: You know there is a Cinémathèque in Paris? And he said to me when the editing was done, he said, There’s Visconti. I said, Who’s Visconti? I had no knowledge at all, no knowledge of films. I’d seen few films. I knew nothing. I was interested in painting and theater at the time. Then I learned and I went to see movies.
Because to advance in society is slow, slow, and slow. To change history is very slow. The first two times I came to the States—black people didn’t have the right to vote—but we have seen them in France, American soldiers, black, and they come and save us. A lot of them died in France. They were doing the job of the American army. I come to the States and they don’t have the right to vote! Can you believe that? So, society is so slow. A feminist is a bore. [Spills tea] It’s OK, since my dress is tea-colored.
posted by Luís Miguel Dias quarta-feira, novembro 04, 2009
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