Pedro Costa Interview in LITTLE WHITE LIES

"At the time the experience of listening to something by Wire and PiL was amazing. It was like seeing a Godard film. It was another world where you would get out of the movie theatre. It was a time when the person next door would probably do something amazing, but it wasn’t a commercial competition. There was also a political revolution in Portugal at the same time, where the fascist dictatorship ended and the streets were full of anarchists, communists, and socialists, so from the ages of 13 to 22 I had everything, the music, the cinema, the politics, all at the same time. What this made me see was that John Ford was a hundred thousand times more progressive and communist than so-called left wing documentaries saying things like “film is a gun”, and “change the world”. It was Ozu, Mizoguchi and Ford that were saying that really, you just had to be patient to see it."

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"The idea [for Ne change rien] then came for me to be there while [Jeanne Balibar] was rehearsing. When I filmed her in concert I didn’t want to do a film like [Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones recent 'concert documentary'] Shine a Light with the camera turning upside down, and I wasn’t interested in doing a ‘making of’ that you have on DVDs with guys in the studio telling jokes and drinking beer."

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"The Warhol film I show [at the recent Costa retrospective + carte-blanche at the Tate Modern] is called Beauty, a film I saw recently and it’s just like In Vanda’s Room, the difference being that he made it without thinking for one second whereas I took two years of pain and blood."

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Full interview is here.

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