Anna Karina

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

“I am the old story. L'histoire ancienne. But an old story can still be a good story, no?”

“It was a strange love story from the beginning. I could see Jean-Luc was looking at me all the time, and I was looking at him too, all day long. We were like animals.”

“I was lucky enough to meet and marry Jean-Luc who is responsible for any education and culture I have today.”

“The very first picture that I did, the director came up to me on the street - I was 14 at the time - and asked me if I would be in a short film that he was doing called 'Pigen og Skoene,' which means 'The Girl with the Shoes,' which is a funny title but that is how it is.”

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

“Jean-Luc asked me to play a small part in 'Breathless,' the role of Belmondo's former girlfriend. It was just one scene. I asked him what I had to do and he said, 'You have to take your clothes off,' and I said no.”

“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.”

“Godard and I got married because I got pregnant. Then I lost the child and they couldn't do anything about it. So I went to a kind of, not a crazy house, but a place where you have to relax. I hated it.”

“It could be a little bit sad as a young girl to sit there and wait in front of the telephone that would never ring.”

“The only thing I can recall being allowed to improvise was the little singsong 'I don't know what to do' chant in 'Pierrot Le Fou.' Which I came up with because I literally did not know what to do!”

“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.”

“'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.”

“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.”