Agnes Varda Quotes

I really just enjoy listening to talk [to John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling]... not even about acting or anything. It's interesting because I felt really connected to all these people very easily. They're all very open emotionally, like we're in the scene together, so you never feel like anyone's acting.

If you show you're human and have something to say, people will connect with you.

I want viewers to relate to me on a different level, not just a sexual level.

I wasn't good at being affable. You get beyond that and realise the attraction in any human being has more to do with what they give to someone rather than just being face candy.

I love talking to people, hearing people's stories; I love honest things.

I treat people and I deal with my fighters and I deal with the fans like a real person. I don't come out and read canned statements written by our lawyers.

You know what matters? Touching people. Being a real person. Because when you're in front of real people, they gon' give you a real reaction.

I can ask someone to let me into all aspects of their life for several years, but people have got to have that gift: that courage and that talent for opening their lives to the camera. Being candid is a gift, and that's what the audience responds to. Part of it is me asking, and part of it is just their inherent talent, which is what you are looking for when you make documentaries - people that are really going to let you in on what they are going through.

It's just a matter of who you are and how you talk to people. Your subjects will trust you only if you're confident about what you're doing. It really bothers me when photographers first approach a subject without a camera, try to establish a personal relationship, and only then get out their cameras. It's deceptive. I think you should just show up with a camera, to make your intentions clear. People will either accept you or they won't.

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know.

All the pictures in magazines and all of that is fun but in the end it's all about your soul and who you are and have you connected with the people.

In acting class, you talked always about keeping it real and don't act... connect with the people and connect with the partner that you're acting with. The same is also true in politics.

I've come to realize that people connect more when they know you're telling them the truth or some aspect of your story, some mutated version of how you are experiencing this life.

My biggest fear always is that I’ll photograph an idea rather than a person, so I try to be quite sensitive to how people are.

That story about the two women in my life is - a lot of people get upset, a lot of people question it. Steven Soderbergh said to me, "The story of your life is incredible. The real story of your life that's interesting, more interesting than all the other stuff - the franchises, the movies, the songs, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra - the real thing that's interesting and unbelievable is the relationship with these two women. And if you're willing to put that out there, you know then, you're going to have a great movie. Because that's the movie."

Try to do your best to look people in the eye and talk to them without a gadget being in between you all the time.

What is the truth is that every one of my films is a film that I'd love to go see, and I think that's very important because I always think it's a mistake to make movies for other people, or to make them for a demographic, or try to second guess an audience.

The thing always is to go to where people really are and what they're really feeling about life.

It’s good to be vulnerable in amongst the grandeur; you shouldn’t lose that sense of intimacy and vulnerability with people.

If you put your personal stories out there people always connect.

There is so much crap in the world, both in show and other businesses, that I try to be vulnerable myself, in the hopes that there is some truth I can get to, that makes people feel less alone in the world.

I tend to avoid melodrama. I try to create very realistic settings and very realistic experiences and realistic responses to these experiences. Melodrama is the use of really big events that may or may not happen in real life - certainly they do, but they're not events that are common to most people. Most of the things that happen in my novels are things that could happen to people in real life.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

I'm interested in taking things from my relationship that I don't see on screen - or that I feel like that could be useful or helpful if it were out in the open - and trying to put that in the movies as much as possible.