“She was the first to approach filmmaking with kindness”
Joanna Bruzdowicz The Composer // Bruzdowicz Composed music for several varda films including vagabond, The gleaners and i and le petit amour
“Agnès and I were friends for 34 years, and worked on nine films together. She discovered some music that I had composed and wanted to use it for her film Vagabond, and as far as she’s concerned this was the first time that we met, although I remember meeting her years beforehand, at a global summit for women in 1970.
As you can see from her films, Agnès was very interested in the role and the position of women in the world, especially in film and culture and music.
Agnès was somebody who always knew what she wanted. She always knew the way that her films would be shot. She never wrote her stories down on paper, and the actors never received a script. She would tell them the character that they would be playing, but never what they would be doing until the day that they were on set.
And of course, she was somebody who always had a very precise idea of the music that would be used in her films.
I began writing music for her while I was living in Brussels and she lived in Paris. I remember my husband having to hold the phone to the piano because phones back then were not wireless, and Agnès would listen through the phone and tell me if she wanted to change anything that she heard.
With Vagabond, what was wonderful for me as a musician working on the film was that every time you hear my music, there’s no dialogue. No noises from the outside. The music is not romantic; it’s a very hard portrait of this woman who is alone and sad. It was important to Agnès to have this meeting between the music and the actress.
Her approach to making documentaries was very important, as no-one else had done it like this before. She was always mixing beautiful stories in with real facts, so you never got an exact documentary, or an exact piece of fiction.
With The Gleaners And I, she would visit Brussels and sit with me while I played her music, and she would match the score to the images in her head. It was a beautiful way of doing things; I would just have to follow what she imagined the film would look like.
Probably the biggest challenge when collaborating with Agnès came with making Jacquot De Nantes. I knew Jacques Demy very well, and it was very sad to see him so sick. After he died, Agnès continued making the film and we spoke on the phone every day to discuss how she wanted the music to honour the film.
We had a saxophonist lined up for the score, but Agnès had changed her mind so we let him go. Then I get this call from her on the last day before I was supposed to travel for work; she hadn’t slept because she realised how important a saxophone would be to the score, because of how much Jacques had loved jazz.
The saxophonist didn’t have a phone, but I’d remembered him saying that he was going to feed the ducks with his daughter in a park in Warsaw. Do you know how many parks are in Warsaw? 42! We had people out hunting for this saxophonist across all of these parks.
But we found him, and I’m glad we did because he plays this beautiful fragment for the film. You see, with Agnès you had to find the saxophonist, you had to find the thing that she wanted.
She changed cinema. She was somebody who was never afraid about what she was telling the public. And she was friendly with everybody; when she was filming them, when she was talking with them. It could be somebody without a house, without anything, which turned out to be plenty of people in her films.
She had exactly the same approach to these people as she did Catherine Deneuve. In the world of film and art, there are plenty of people who are arrogant and do not regard other people with kindness. I think that Agnès was the first person to approach filmmaking with kindness.”
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