This is the story of how Anna Karina & Jean-Luc Godard first โgot together.โ
Anna Karina: That happened while we were shooting the picture in Geneva. 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.ย We were like animals. One night we were at this dinner in Lausanne. My boyfriend, who was a painter, was there too. And suddenly I felt something under the table โ it was Jean-Lucโs hand. He gave me a piece of paper and then left to drive back to Geneva. I went into another room to see what heโd written.ย It said, โI love you.ย Rendezvous at midnight at the Cafรฉ de la Prez.โ And then my boyfriend came into the room and demanded to see the piece of paper, and he took my arm and grabbed it and read it.ย He said, โYouโre not going.โ And I said, โI am.โ And he said, โBut you canโt do this to me.โ ย I said, โBut Iโm in love too, so Iโm going.โ But he still didnโt believe me. We drove back to Geneva and I started to pack my tiny suitcase.ย He said, โTell me youโre not going.โ And I said, โIโve been in love with him since I saw him the second time. And I canโt do anything about it.โ It was like something electric. I walked there, and I remember my painter was running after me crying. I was, like, hypnotized โ it never happened again to me in my life.
So I get to the Cafe de la Prez, and Jean-Luc was sitting there reading a paper, but I donโt think he was really reading it. I just stood there in front of him for what seemed like an hour but I guess was not more that thirty seconds. Suddenly he stopped reading and said,โ Here you are. Shall we go?โ So we went to his hotel. The next morning when I woke up he wasnโt there. I got very worried. I took a shower, and then he came back about an hour later with the dress I wore in the film - the white dress with flowers. And it was my size, perfect. It was like my wedding dress.
We carried on shooting the film, and, of course, my painter left. When the picture was finished, I went back to Paris with Jean-Luc, Michel Subor, who was the main actor, and Laszlo Szabo, who was also in the film, in Jean-Lucโs American car. We were all wearing dark glasses and we got stopped at the border โ I guess they thought we were gangsters. When we arrived in Paris, Jean-Luc dropped the other two off and said to me, โWhere are you going?โย I said, โI have to stay with you. Youโre the only person I have in the world now.โ And he said, โOh my God.โ
Extract taken from an interview with Anna Karina conducted by Graham Fuller inย Projections 13: Women Film-makers on Film-making, edited by Isabella Weibrecht, John Boorman and Walter Donohue (Faber & Faber, 2004)ย
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