“She saw the glass half full even when there was no glass”
“Agnès was a very demanding person, which would make situations a little tense at times, but she never got mad.
I loved her at first sight. A mutual friend introduced me to her on a Sunday afternoon, and I began working for her on the Monday morning. We worked together for 17 years after that.
Agnès created a huge sense of freedom for herself when she was working. She would never keep herself from doing what she wanted.
We wouldn’t do much preparation ahead of a shoot, as Agnès liked to work instinctively. She collected images, installations, feelings, impressions, and from this she would build a concept.
For example, with The Gleaners And I, she didn’t say that she was going to make a film about potatoes. It was about potatoes, but it was more to do with what these potatoes say about people’s relationships with each other and with themselves.
She was very demanding on set, but never from a technical point of view. She was never keen on special effects.
All of Agnès’ films started with curiosity. A little idea would form in her head, and then she would start digging to find out more. She was curious about absolutely everything and everyone. She was as interested in listening to [artist] Pierre Soulages talking about his art as she was listening to a woman in the market talking about her spices.
Agnès was a strong woman but I’m reluctant to say that she was a feminist. She was simply a woman who believed that being a woman shouldn’t keep her from doing anything that she wanted.
I would say that she was more of an example of a strong woman than an activist. She was born in 1928, so she lived through some quite huge changes in society. She wore trousers when no other women were wearing trousers, just because she wanted to. It would take a very strong personality to ignore the comments that would’ve been made about that at the time.
In Faces Places there’s a scene where Agnès is pasting one of the big photographs of a local woman onto a building. It was one of the most dangerous days of shooting; there was a huge storm and the tide was coming up, everything was a catastrophe. But she managed to turn out one of my absolute favourite scenes from that day; she made it into something so positive and so poetic.
At her funeral, her son, Mathieu Demy, used the analogy of a positive person seeing the glass half full to describe his mother, only he said that she saw the glass half full even when there was no glass. She didn’t need to see something in front of her to be positive.”