I write on a 1959 Groma Kolibri typewriter. I had to go to Berlin to get a ribbon for it.
Really?
By train.
You don’t fly?
I stopped flying, yeah.
Why?
Because it’s wrong.
Morally?
Aesthetically. It’s ugly. The buildings are ugly, the environs of airports are ugly, the experience of flying is an ugly experience.
How do you define ugly?
Not beautiful.
Are your walks about beauty?
Yes, of course. I only want to be surrounded by beautiful things. I’m an aesthete. I think that globalization is a chimera, it’s a false thing, it’s not going to happen. I believe that the pursuit of globalization is very destructive.
From an interview with psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas:
Would you say that the collective unconscious is modified by time and culture?
Absolutely, I’m very interested in social dreaming, in cultural dreaming; every society dreams, and the dream is what we call culture, so every societies culture dreams something. Film is a form of dreaming and if you look at, let’s say, a run of films in the 1960s, there were these disaster films; ships flipping over and sinking in the sea, towering infernos; before 9/11 they were already going up in flames at a time when North America was going to its doom in Vietnam. It was the absolute end of American innocence.
More fundamentally, where is the point when a generation forms?
Well I’m a contextualist. Each decade, or even every two, or five years, there is a different culture context. So things are constantly being redefined; this has to do with memory.
Objects redefine the individual?
Society redefines itself; it reinvents itself.
From an interview with Nobel laureat Francoise Barré-Sinoussi, at the Institut Pasteur in Paris.
When did you first hear about AIDS?
This was 1982. The first cases were reported in the United States in June 1981. I was working on retroviruses and the relationship between retroviruses and cancer and leukemia. In 1982 the clinicians saw similar cases as reported in the US and came to us and said that we have to face this new disease. Nobody knew what its cause was. A lot of viruses had been suspected. And they asked what we thought about the potential role of retroviruses.
Were there a lot of rumors?
Not to my knowledge. Several families of viruses were already suspected. A lot of viruses that infect humans and viruses that effect lymphocytes. But the possibility of retroviruses was not yet explored.
From an interview with film director Jean-Jacques Beineix:
Was Diva the time when business took over?
It was the beginning of mass reproduction and games. The defeat of some kind of cinema which was made for everybody. Which could play in large theaters and small theaters.
The age of the producer.
Yes. The age of the producer. First the producers were the nice guys but they don’t exist anymore. The producer is the worst and he’s the best, he has a foot in both doors. He’s fighting the system, but at the same time he is the biggest success of the system. Now it is a stock market. Owned by people who want to have the quickest return of investment with the cheapest product. Steven Spielberg said that good films are industrial accidents. I don’t like these times, I feel more and more like a stranger.