Top 25 Anna Karina Quotes

At the time we were all just very young people who wanted to have fun and do pictures in a different way than the old folks did it – make it all more spontaneous and more alive and more natural.

Quite simply, I owe everything to Jean-Luc. He taught me everything I know about films, about books, about art, about life.

Everyone thinks that Jean-Luc is an intellectual. But he’s very a sportive person too. He likes action. He likes people to be physical in their roles. They had to move a lot.

To make films one has to take everything seriously.

I have to tell you that we never had any scripts. Jean-Luc never wrote a script in his life. He would write the dialogue that morning before shooting.

I did Palmolive and Monsavon, which is two soap films, and you can’t do two at the same time. I was underage, see, so I didn’t really know. I didn’t realize that you’re not supposed to do two soap films at the same time. Because on one side of the Champs-Elysees there was Monsavon, and on the other there was Palmolive.

I’ve been writing short stories since I was a little girl.

I loved the films of Jean Gabin.

I’m always playing mostly the nice girl or the victim. I think it’s perhaps what directors think about me.

I went to see Gerard Philipe and Jean Gabin in pictures. Gerard Philipe spoke beautiful French, while Jean Gabin spoke slang. And after a while I realized that when Gabin said, ‘What’s up, lady?’ it meant the same thing as when Philipe said, ‘Good evening, madam.’

I left school when I was 14 to go into Danish films. When I was 17, I went to Paris to make my fortune.

You can always tell a man’s nationality by introducing him to a beautiful girl. An Englishman shakes her hand; a Frenchman kisses her hand; an American asks her for a date; and a Russian wires Moscow for instructions.

Many other directors, they have lots of scripts and they never rehearse as much, and you never really have time to be a part of it. With Jean-Luc, you always had time to be a part of it. It’s difficult to explain to normal people.

I always wanted to be an actress, ever since I was a little girl.

After a while, Godard was going to do ‘A Woman is a Woman’ with Sami Frey and another actress in the leading lady part but they couldn’t do it and so he had to find somebody else. I was not supposed to play the lead in it in the beginning – I originally had one of the smaller parts.

I always loved New York.

It’s always important to talk about what Jean-Luc did – for him, for me, for everyone.

Actors and actresses have done a lot of films with their legs, with their arms, with the whole crew and the camera. Why shouldn’t they be as good as a first-assistant director who has made three or four films? They’ve done it with their body!

Obviously when I came I wanted to live in Paris. I wanted to work or… if that didn’t work out… perhaps go away with a troupe of traveling performers – you must remember I was very young.

Every character is so different, if you put the photos next to each other, you see how different I looked and how different I tried to be. And that’s what I really enjoyed, that I could really be a different character every time.

Jean-Luc Godard saw me in a commercial. He first asked me to play a little part in ‘Breathless’ of a girl who is taking her clothes off. I said, ‘No, I don’t want to take my clothes off.’ But he called me again for ‘Le Petit Soldat.’ He said it was a political film, so I didn’t have to take my clothes off at all.

Jean-Luc is a person who has a lot of feelings, and he knows that to listen and look at a person is very important. You have to listen when you act.

I made films for soaps and I was the Coca-Cola girl for England. I did a lot popular films, too.

I had some bad times. We got married because, you know, I was pregnant. But then I lost the baby. Ups and downs. And then when ‘Bande a Part’ came along, I was in a really bad shape. I didn’t want to be alive any more.

‘Le Petit Soldat’ was banned in Paris; it wasn’t out in the movie houses. It was forbidden because it was talking about the Algerian war.