Renowned veteran director of the nouvelle vague Agnès Varda returns to UK screens this month with The Beaches of Agnès (Les Plages d’Agnès). Part autobiography, part documentary, part cinematic essay, Varda’s latest film is a lyrical, free-flowing recollection of her life in and around the cinema.

Varda studied art history and photography in Paris before making her first feature, La Pointe-Courte, in 1954. Thanks to her friendship with Jean-Luc Godard, Varda went on to make the dazzling Cléo de 5 à 7, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1962. Between 1962 and 1990, Varda was married to fellow director and master of ‘the film in song’ Jacques Demy. Side by side, they made films in both France and Hollywood over the years. More recently, Varda has returned to her visual art roots, and created installation exhibitions for such institutions as the Cartier Foundation and Venice Biennale.

Slightly unsure of what to expect from a ‘short, plump old lady’ with such a glittering past, I meet Agnès in a small office in Holborn, London, to discuss her latest film. She speaks with English clearly learnt in America, and wears a curious mixture of tasteful, floaty clothes and a two-tone ‘punk’ haircut. I find her to be at once amiable and venerable.

David Warwick: Where did the inspiration for The Beaches of Agnès come from?

Agnès Varda:I wanted to make a point because I was turning 80. I thought I should do something. You always remember passing by a zero, and when I was younger I could never imagine being 80.

DW: You didn’t like the idea?

AV: Not at all! I can remember thinking that people who were 40 were very old, and people who were 50 – they were out! I remember vividly being disinterested in these people and thinking, ‘I hope I don’t live beyond 45’. I thought it was poetic to die young.

DW: In the film you say that imagining yourself as ancient is funny.

AV: Haha, yes. Do you know that my grandchildren call me ‘Mamita Punk’? It’s like the name of a stripper! I love it. I’m glad I’m still in the mood for enjoying jokes and punk behaviour… Most of the papers like to quote the first sentence of the film, ‘I’m a short, plump, old lady’, but the second part of the sentence is more important – that it’s the others that I like, the others that interest me, that intrigue me passionately. That’s the statement of the film. It appears at the end of the film when they give me all those brooms for my birthday, and I sit here and I think, what are all these brooms. And I say, ‘it happened yesterday; it’s already gone, it’s already in the film’, and then, ‘je me rappelle pourquoi je vis’ – ‘I remember why I’m living’. Making this film is a way of living on, living and remembering.

DW: How did you go about making The Beaches? How much was scripted, and how much emerged from your talents as a gleaner?

AV: A lot was scripted and planned. When we build a set, when I decide I want to show my courtyard as it was, we have to be organised. When we have the boat on the river Seine, and the whale on the beach, we have to be organised. It’s set up and constructed. But I remember to let myself be disturbed, like when I go to my childhood house: I visit the garden, and I remember my sister, and then I meet the man who lives there and his wife. They are collectors of little trains, and since I have the soul of a documentarist I can’t stop myself. I question them, I make them speak about how they found them, how much they cost, the value of the collection – and I’m gone! So I stage a lot of things, it’s organised, but open to things happening.

DW: What about the narration?

AV: I wrote most of the narration before shooting, so that I knew where I was going. But sometimes during the shooting, I have an idea and I say it to the camera. A lot of the narration was finished later or changed – because it has to fit, and also be sometimes contradictory. I like to play off words, which becomes a play of images.

DW:I imagine it was a difficult film to edit?

AV: Yes, the editing was long – nine months – but I had to figure out how to make it free… I think it is free, and that’s what makes me feel good. Like the scene with the naked couple in the courtyard. It is interesting that you have this in the middle of the film, and then you go to something else… By the way, I heard that because of this scene the film is banned – because the man has a hard-on. Earlier in the film, we use a fake hard-on, but this is a real one, and because of that it’s banned… I should have used a real one both times, but at the time I didn’t think of it, and then it was too late.

DW: You praise new digital techniques in The Beaches.

AV: I praise it? … I use it.

DW: You seem impressed by it though. Grateful for it.

AV: Yes. I could have shot it in 35mm and had a second camera, but I knew that I wanted lots of little editing tricks; and if I had done it in 35mm it would have been hard. When you do any kind of tricks in 35mm, you have to go backwards and forwards between film and digital. Also, sometimes, when something was missing from the film, I’d take my camera, I’d go in the street or in my courtyard, I’d film something, bring it back in, and five minutes later I’d put it in the film. So for a film so complicated, that relies so much on collage, I think we had a good tool.

DW: The form of The Beaches is very interesting. You mix lots of different material and styles.

AV: Yes. The technique is collage, and many artists have done that – painters like Rauschenberg for example. It’s a way of disturbing the paper. Collage can just be a puzzle in which you have to figure out the real figure or the real landscape, but you can also make a collage that doesn’t end as a recognisable figure. You can make a collage that is just a collage.

DW: And you’d define The Beaches as a collage that is just a collage?

AV: No. It’s hard to define. I see it as an Unidentified Flying Object, because it doesn’t belong to documentary really, even though I speak about real people, and it’s not a fiction film because it’s my life. And it’s not action, it’s not totally fantastical, it’s not a thriller. It’s a film that comes out of me. As a cinematic object, that’s the way I see it.

DW: It’s quite a history lesson too, full of radical people and radical ideals.

AV: It’s mostly about showing many people. Alexander Calder on the beach, dancing like a bear, images I have of Fidel Castro, pictures I took in China. It’s about part of my life but mixed with a big period of history, the second half of the 20th century. Even though I never belonged to a political party, never signed anything, I have been with it, and I try to understand it.

DW: You explain in the film how you were an angry feminist in the 70s. Is the fight for feminism still important to you now?

AV: Yes, it’s still important. I mean, read the paper. The fight is just beginning in many parts of the world. In France, in England, in some educated countries, it has changed, not totally, but at least the thing about birth control is coming to be understood and used. But in many countries it is not… The freedom of women though, it’s exciting. And more and more women make films. We have some very good directors. Claire Denis for example: her work deals with something fantastic coming out of life, and it’s so strong, so powerful. Have you seen the one with all the blood?

DW: Trouble Everyday?

AV: Yes. It’s incredible; very powerful. She’s very powerful.

DW: What about her latest film, 35 Rhums?

AV: Yes. That one’s strange; difficult to understand, but interesting. She’s always interested in people, black people.

DW: In The Beaches you recall how, when you were just starting out, you thought that you could make a film by just putting words and images together.

AV: Yes, I was ridiculous at that time. It’s obviously not just that at all. It is movement, it is editing, it is music. It is creating a world, a mixed world, like in The Beaches, in the first sequence on the beach with the mirrors. The big thing in this scene is the wind. My scarf goes like this, and it pushes me like that. The wind makes the scene feel much more alive.

DW: The Beaches reminded me a little bit of Godard’s Histoires du cinéma, in as far as both films use this technique of collage, and both pursue this old question of ‘what is cinema’.

AV: Yes, I think it deals with this question, ‘what is cinema?’ through how I found specific cinematic ways of telling what I was telling. I could have told you the same things that are in the film by just talking to you for six hours. But instead I found shapes. Like in the scene when I wanted to show the five men their fathers, whom they’d never met. I made a sort of exhibition with a 16mm projector and a screen, and they have to push the images of their fathers into the night. I could have just shown them a picture, but I found something that people will share and feel. It’s a ritual and a burial. I found things like this in many places in the film. I made a fool of myself, and I made a fake car in which I tried to park. It’s interesting to do that at 80, and I enjoy doing it and showing it to people and to my grandchildren.

DW: Will you ever stop making films?

AV: Manoel de Oliveira, the Portuguese director, is 100 and he’s still making films. I hope I don’t get very old though. Very old age is terrible, apart from in a few cases. I will continue to do installations until the end, and they include films. You have the space, you have to build, you have to invent. But fiction films, I don’t think I’ll do any more of those. The Beaches of Agnès is already a hybrid.

Interview by David Warwick

The new British zombie movie Colin is an ultra-low-budget film that follows the eponymous character around the streets of post-apocalyptic London during an outbreak of the living dead. The twist in this film is that the lead character is a zombie himself for most of the running time… Between screenings of the film at this summer’s FrightFest at the Empire cinema in London, Alex Fitch spoke to director Mark Price about genre audiences, the differences between high- and low-budget film and the benefits of cheap technology.

Alex Fitch: Was the screening at Frightfest the world premiere?

Mark Price: No, it has screened in a couple of other festivals. We fell in with our sales agent when we screened at the Abertoir festival, which is the only Welsh horror festival – it’s in Aberystwyth, and spelt Abertoir like Aberystwyth but pronounced Abattoir – it’s funny…

AF: I guess the low budget of the film is a double-edged sword, because a lot of the pre-publicity has been about how little it cost, rather than about the fact that it’s a very good zombie film.

MP: The good thing about that press is that it’s a platform for us to talk about what we wanted to do with the characters – that’s the heart of the story – and how we went about making the film. But I think that once the film is released the interest in the low budget will go away fairly quickly, even though it’ll be all over the DVD covers and what not. We always hoped that the quality of the story would be the selling point.

AF: At this year’s FrightFest there are a lot of zombie films, and out of the ones I’ve seen so far, the two that have impressed me the most are your film and Pontypool. I think that maybe it’s because when you have a very low budget and want your film to attract attention, you really have to work on the script and the actors…

MP: I was raised on blockbuster movies in Swansea and I still feel a lot of fondness for them, but I think the script and the acting should always be the most important thing, regardless of all the amazing advances in digital technology – they’re just tools to tell your story. Although we weren’t in a position to embrace much technology, we did embrace the ability to make a movie in your own home, in your bedroom on an old wrecked PC. I’m a zombie fan, I wanted to do a zombie movie, but I also wanted to do something that I could be confident hadn’t really be done before, obviously missing the fact that there was a movie called I, Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain. I honestly think that if I’d known about I, Zombie beforehand I probably wouldn’t have made Colin!

AF: I think I, Zombie is probably obscure enough that you don’t have to worry about people having seen it…

MP: …and it’s a very different movie as well, apparently. I haven’t seen it myself, but Andrew Parkinson, the director, sent me a copy of it; he’s a really nice guy. His film is more of a slow transformation from a man into a zombie, so by the end of the movie, he becomes this zombie – it’s more akin to The Fly, I guess. We just kind of skim over that in the first 10 or 15 minutes of our movie and crack on with the zombie part!

AF: I thought the structure of the film was really interesting – you leave the origin of Colin’s transformation into a zombie right until the end. What motivated that decision?

MP: I think it was the idea of rewarding the audience with interesting information. I know giving the back-story isn’t always necessarily the best way to develop a character, but for us, it felt more like a payoff. We always knew how the movie was going to end, but how do we draw attention to certain objects and items? That was the challenge. If you look at a movie that’s shot on 35mm with a budget like Chinatown or Hot Fuzz, when the twist comes at the end, you realise everything you’ve been watching means nothing. But that’s OK because you have a character trying to find something out, so the audience is with him, trying to find that something out. When you have a character who isn’t motivated in any clear direction and because of the low-budget format we shot the movie on, there’s a very real danger that we look like we don’t know how to tell a story, or how to edit a scene. So, we could lose a lot of our audience along the way, it’s scary for us that it all relies on that last 10 to 15 minutes, but we certainly wanted that to be a rewarding experience for the audience.

AF: What kind of camera did you shoot it on? It does have a very sharp, clear image, but it’s obviously not HD.

MP: We shot it on two camcorders, one was a three-chip camcorder – both Panasonics – and the other was a single-chip camera, because the three-chip died about half of the way through. This is the little trick to it: you can’t get these cameras to look like 35mm, and if we were to try and make it look like 35mm and light it very cleanly, it would just look cheap. So we really went the other way and embraced the flaws in the technology – we had lots of ‘hot spots’ and dark shadows, and I think that lends something to the visual quality of the film. If I knew as much about cameras as the cameramen I’ve been meeting recently, I would have gone: ‘I’d never have made a movie like this, let’s not bother’, and we wouldn’t have made it! So, sometimes a little ignorance can be a good thing! This idea that you have to spend a lot of money on technology, on HD cameras, it’s really not the case. A low-budget filmmaker only needs to worry about the story and the characters.

AF: I wouldn’t say that you don’t deserve to get a decent budget for your next project whatever that may be, but when low-budget filmmakers get a big budget for their next film, quite often it completely falls apart. What would your ideal next project be?

MP: Well, the idea for our next project is to keep the budget very low, so low that we retain a level of control, but we want the film to look like it cost three million, so we’re trying to find ways of doing that, which is a challenge. But at the same time, I think movie-making is problem-solving, whether your movie costs £70 million or £70. The best thing we can do is to hang on to the team of problem solvers we had on Colin, making sure we’re all working together on the next film. There are elements of the next film that seem easy and there are elements that seem beyond our reach, but that’s the excitement. That’s what it was like with Colin – when we started this, I knew nothing about make-up design and now I can make a zombie! Our make-up guys showed us how to make zombies, so that they wouldn’t necessarily be around all the time.

AF: In the publicity materials for the film, it says you found the actors for the film on Facebook – was it the same for the crew as well?

MP: That’s something that got a bit out of hand, actually. We used Facebook to communicate with everyone, but we didn’t really find many people on Facebook. Alistair, who plays Colin, I knew already, and other actors I met through Alistair. We had two auditions. We were really looking for people who we got along with and there’d be a degree of banter. We didn’t want any egos on the film because it’s low-budget, there’s no place for them. It was such a harmonious experience that if luck comes in quotas, then I’m in serious trouble; I’m fucked, because we used it all up on this film, so the next one’s going to be a disaster!

AF: I hope not! In terms of locations for the film, it doesn’t actually look that British, it has more of an international feel to it. For example, the scene with the hoodies, for want of a better word…

MP: …yeah, the stacked terraces…

AF: … I saw a similar scene in an Italian gangster movie recently, so it feels much more European than British. Was it just that you looked for interesting locations and didn’t have a particular aesthetic in mind?

MP: We were definitely looking for places that had a sense of isolation. For Rowley Way, one of my students – I was teaching low-budget techniques at Kilburn Park – said: ‘You’ve got to see this place, Rowley Way, it’s just off Abbey Road, it’s fantastic above ground and underground.’ What it allowed us to do visually was to really breathe and have that sense of depth. Actually, I still look at the film and every time I see those scenes, I’m waiting for someone to walk out of a door and just blow a take, which I missed this entire time!

AF: You didn’t leaflet everyone who lived there to say: ‘Could you please stay in your homes between the following hours…’?

MP: No, the students were telling us that Rowley Way was quite dangerous and we shouldn’t go down there without them! It was like one o’clock in the afternoon and I guess everyone was still in bed! Everything else there – the tower blocks were just around the corner – was visually so striking. I’ve got a lot of fondness for those places and definitely the ones that were incorporated in the film.

AF: What has been your students’ reaction to the film? Have they seen a complete cut yet?

MP: They’ve seen it and they were amazingly responsive and positive. That’s such a relief, and the response had been great from all of them. And that scene with the hoodie guys – they’re not actors, they’re just giving it a go! One of them was auditioning to get into RADA, the other one was just giving it his best shot. The next day, he just cracked me up, saying: ‘Man, I think I’m the best zombie in your film!’ And I said: ‘You weren’t a zombie, you were a human!’ ‘Was I?’ he says, ‘ah, whatever!’ And they were up against two LAMDA students – Daisy and Alistair – and a very experienced television actor. It was really amazing to see these two guys thriving among all these actors, holding their own. The guy with the samurai sword, he had just come round, giving it a go – he’s the guy who found the location – and he said: ‘I can get a samurai sword if you want…’ I said: ‘It is it sharp?’ and he said no, so I thought, ‘Go get it then!’

AF: Nobody lost their limbs in the making of this movie…

MP: No, we were OK, but it was quite scary, his running around, waving a sword at people going: ‘Arrgghh, I’m gonna cut your head off!’

AF: I suppose in a low-budget film, one of the most important applications of budget and training must be the fight scenes, where people are being beaten up, so that no one gets hurt.

MP: Yeah. That actually explains some of our frenetic camera work, because if you had the camera smoothly gliding along, you’d see that apart from the two actors we had placed to throw proper hits that registered properly on camera, everyone else is awkwardly grappling. We had some fun with that in the documentary on the DVD, you really get to see some of these guys being quite lame, because it’s really funny! Of course, in the film, because of the camera work we wanted to generate a level of intensity. The camera becomes a character and the idea was to have two camera styles. There’s a dominant human perspective in a scene, which is quite panicky and frantic and handheld, then there’s the zombie’s perspective, which is relatively calm and quiet.

AF: I probably shouldn’t ask this as a film should stand on its own, but the way that I read the final scenes was that when Colin comes home, it almost starts awakening memories in him. Was that your intent or do zombies not have human thoughts?

MP: One of the things we wanted with the film was for the audience to ask themselves questions. There are certain elements I don’t want to address, I want to leave people to come up with their own decisions. The basement scene is a really interesting one, some of the stuff I’ve heard back about that, what people think is going on there is like: ‘You’re a sick, sick man Price!’ And I’m like: ‘Woah! We don’t clearly state that! You’re the one who came up with that…’ I don’t think it’s my place to tell anyone what it was. The film should speak for itself and I wouldn’t want to acknowledge that you’re absolutely correct or rob you of thoughtful analysis. It’s not the place of the filmmaker to do that. That’s the one downside to DVD. You think certain filmmakers are geniuses, and then you hear them talk about their stuff and you go: ‘Ohhh, man, Brett Ratner isn’t a genius!’

Interview by Alex Fitch

John Maringouin made his feature debut in 2006 with Running Stumbled, a nightmarish documentary of sorts that turned the camera on the director’s sadistic, drug-addicted, estranged father and his surreally sordid, chaotic existence. He returns with Big River Man, another unconventional documentary that charts eccentric Slovenian swimmer Martin Strel’s extraordinary attempt to swim the Amazon. An unlikely champion, the rotund, hard-drinking, 53-year-old Martin combines a day job as a flamenco guitar teacher with a line in swimming the world’s most polluted rivers. The megalomaniac nature of the project, the strangeness of his relationship to his entourage and the spectacular Amazonian scenery make for one of the most enjoyable films of the year, a soulful journey into dark places, lunacy and the extremes of human behaviour that is at turns desperately farcical and profoundly affecting. VIRGINIE SÉLAVY had the pleasure of interviewing John Maringouin for a second time at the Edinburgh Film Festival in June 2009, where the film had its UK premiere.

Virginie Sélavy: What gave you the idea of making a film about Martin Strel?

John Maringouin: I was watching TV with my girlfriend in the middle of the Iraq war and there was a really short piece on CNN, maybe 15 seconds – ‘man swims Mississippi’. I grew up in Mississippi, and you couldn’t go in the river, so that was already interesting to me. When we called Martin we found out that he was going to swim the Amazon. It started up in a random way.

VS: The events are narrated by Martin’s son Boris, so in a way, just as in Running Stumbled, it’s the story of a man with a certain form of insanity as seen from his son’s point of view.

JM: That was sort of accidental. I didn’t think of that at first. I realised it quickly, which made me think about a lot of things, but it wasn’t a conscious decision.

VS: Why did you decide to have Boris narrate the story?

JM: I just found it really interesting how much Martin relied on his son. It had more of an emotional weight than just making a film about a man who does something. The onus was on Boris to articulate why his father was swimming these rivers and why Boris would give up his life to help him.

VS: How do you see their relationship?

JM: Boris is a guy who tries to understand his father, who’s an alcoholic at the same time as an Amazon swimmer. I thought that was both traumatic and very funny at the same time!

VS: We never get Martin’s take on the whole thing. Was that deliberate or did you try to talk to him too?

JM: That was another thing that I thought was infinitely funny. There’s a cult leader aspect to him, which I thought was pretty incredible, especially once we got away from civilisation – it was like being with Jim Jones. People started to project onto him all their notions of what it meant to be a superhero.

VS: At one point, the navigator, Matt, describes what Martin does as ‘self-sacrificial’ and ‘Christ-like’. What do you think of that?

JM: I think that in the context of the situation it’s pretty appropriate (laughs). He was certainly being treated like both a god and a martyr.

VS: It goes from that to a point later on in the film where Boris says, ‘we can’t see him as human anymore, more like an animal or a monster’, and he compares him to Frankenstein.

JM: Yes, he was very much both martyr and monster. He was this sort of belligerent, groping monster who was unable to speak and also incontinent… He had to be managed at all times. People were afraid he was going to go crazy and kill everybody on the boat. And at the same time he inspired a sense of religious fervour and wonder.

[…]

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Read the rest of the interview in the autumn 09 issue of Electric Sheep. The focus is on religious extremes on film from Christic masochism to satanic cruelty with articles on biblical hillbilly nightmare White Lightnin’, Jesus Christ Saviour, a documentary on Klaus Kinski’s disastrous New Testament stage play, and divine subversives Alejandro Jodorowsky and Kenneth Anger. Plus: Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, political animation, Raindance 09 and louche mariachi rockabilly Dan Sartain picks his top films!