美国国家公共电台 NPR Agnes Varda And JR: The Cinematic Odd Couple Behind 'Faces Places'

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

We're switching gears now. Agnes Varda is credited with making the first French New Wave film in 1954. Later this year, she'll receive an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. She's still making movies. Her latest is called "Faces Places," and it is a collaboration 1 with a street artist who goes by the initials JR. He's the guy who created the giant toddler looking over the U.S.-Mexico border wall. "Faces Places" is opening in theaters in this country this weekend. Howie Movshovitz of member station KUNC has more.

HOWIE MOVSHOVITZ, BYLINE 2: She's 89 years old. He's 34. She's a giant of film who stood alongside Godard and Truffaut in the 1950s and '60s. He's an up-and-coming visual artist who pastes giant figures on the sides of buildings.

JR: Are we so different? I mean, at the beginning, it was a little bit harder for me because she would just direct everything, and I couldn't place one word. And at some point, I had to be like, OK, if we're really collaborating 3, I have to fight.

AGNES VARDA: We made a good team. You know, we loved working together. We enjoyed it very much.

MOVSHOVITZ: But JR admits that they work very differently.

JR: You know, I'm from a generation where everything goes super fast, where you film, write, text at the same time. And she's from a generation where you stop, think, think again and then do. And I'm always excited to paste and go in the action. And she made me realize that, in cinema - in the writing of cinema - the reflection is the key of everything.

MOVSHOVITZ: Two years ago, this odd couple set out to make some kind of project together. They didn't know what. Agnes Varda says they decided 4 to visit villages in rural France and see what might happen.

VARDA: We thought that we could meet people, and listen to them and listen enough that we would put them in the light in a way of value - give them value - by notice and listening to what they have to say.

MOVSHOVITZ: They filmed their conversations, and JR created huge photographs that he and his team pasted on to the sides of buildings, barns, factory walls, giving their subjects larger-than-life identities.

VARDA: We choose normal people that we met. I would say people with no power. That was the point, mostly. The thing was, can we be person to person? And can we put the meeting as the main action - meeting, listening, enjoying to meet.

MOVSHOVITZ: The met striking dockworkers, farmers, a bellringer.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL RINGING)

MOVSHOVITZ: But as they traveled in his van with the image of a camera pasted on each side, JR says the film also became about them.

JR: The mystery of our relation and where it's going. Literally 5, when you're watching the film, we also don't know where it's going. And that allowed amazing surprise that we couldn't even have written. And the incredible thing for me is that we really didn't know each other before we started the film. So it's not like I met her a couple times, and then two years later, we say, OK, we should do something. It's literally we met on a Monday. On a Tuesday, we meet again briefly 6. And on a Wednesday, we start shooting.

MOVSHOVITZ: JR and Varda each came up with ideas. JR convinced Varda to think of striking dockworkers in the Port of Le Havre as a community, a village. She led him to a mailman, to goat farmers. Then, JR got Varda to agree to address her failing vision.

VARDA: The friendly curiosity that JR put on me about the way I age - it became, for him, sort of side subject.

JR: She didn't want me to film any of that - that she's seeing less and less. But the moment I actually got her to accept is when I say, OK, let me try and realize what you're actually seeing.

MOVSHOVITZ: He recreates some ophthalmologist's vision chart on the steps of the French National Library with 50 people holding giant letters and moving them up and down to replicate 7 Varda's macular degeneration.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

VARDA: (Speaking French).

JR: (Speaking French).

VARDA: (Speaking French).

JR: (Speaking French).

VARDA: So the thing about (unintelligible) - the way you look at things. That's the base of our work, the base of filmmaking, for both of our work. And the fact that my view, my look, my eye - I don't know how to say it - are getting weak and having problems - the question about out of focus or focus is part of our work. So I agree that JR, in a way, questioned that.

MOVSHOVITZ: And she questioned him. This is the first time in her career that spans more than 60 years that she's ever co-directed a film. And she says she found the perfect accomplice 8.

VARDA: We calculated we are 55 years different of age, and it doesn't show in the film. In the work, it doesn't show. It shows on our faces. But the way we got along, the way we decided together, the project kept us very near to each other.

MOVSHOVITZ: So far, Agnes Varda and JR have no plans to collaborate 9 again, but she has no plans to stop working. For NPR News, I'm Howie Movshovitz.