"I blame this movie for starting me smoking again when I was in film school in the eighties. After becoming so smitten with all that Anna Karina embodies, I decided to wear blue tights with red skirts and smoke, constantly. Needless to say it did not turn me into Anna Karina—my tights were the wrong shade of blue, and I was hacking like an old granny at the Santa Anita racetrack. Still, I loved the film, wildly, and love her in it. What is so gorgeous about this DVD is, firstly, Anna herself, and nextly, the color is like powdered paint, soft yet vibrant—not just the gorgeousness of everything Karina wears but also the murals on the walls of the strip club where she works, the jukebox from which Charles Aznavour sings. The exteriors, often shot from high angles on rooftops, have the feel and texture of what Paris must have been at that moment. I saw in the booklet that this film was very special for Jean-Luc Godard and Karina. They were in love, they wed, she was pregnant with their baby, and you can feel the exuberance of the romance in this movie. It’s absolutely exhilarating to me, and also incredibly funny. The other amazing feature on the DVD is a short documentary on Anna Karina made in 1966, clearly to promote Anna, the musical Serge Gainsbourg wrote for her. Serge closes the short, talking in the most brazenly sensual, big, bold close-up about Anna’s humor, her voice, and her sex appeal . . . It’s scrumptious!"

"I made a short film for the sixtieth anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival (Artaud Double Bill), which is a meditation on the scene where Anna Karina goes into a cinema to watch Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and sees Antonin Artaud on-screen. Something about this sequence seemed to define the essence of cinephilia. Perhaps it’s just the thought of seeing actors watch another film within a film I’m watching."

"To me, it’s just a very romantic story. It’s the ultimate, “let’s just drop everything and run away together” movie; the way the story was told was so unique. There’s one scene in particular where Anna Karina is on the beach, and she rolls over and she just says, “F— me.” To put that in a film in that time period — you just didn’t expect that to come out of her mouth. It’s titillating, I guess you could say."

"If you’re forced to pick a sixties Godard, you do it without worry and with as much Godardian esprit, whimsy, impulse, and movie love as you can, and no one’s choice can be better or worse than anyone else’s. I can’t say exactly why this one is my favorite—it’s a vacation travelogue amid genial diatribes and ironic pastiches, four-dimensional masterpieces all—but I can say that when I interviewed Anna Karina (who is very tall, by the way), she guessed that it was, and she also kissed me."

"This has always been my favorite Godard film. The first time I watched it, I was heartbroken because I thought my DVD was defective: the sound kept cutting out. In researching further I learned I was the fool—Godard was playing with sound design. It was in a way I had never heard before. His use of long camera pans with text explaining what our heroes think but would never say is absolutely brilliant. Between Anna Karina, her red tights, and the celebration of American musicals, it manages to sum up all my favorite things."

"I love both equally. In Pierrot le fou it was the garish colors, footloose narrative, and moments of total ennui where nothing happens and Anna Karina suddenly breaks into song for no good reason. In Vivre sa vie it was the black-and-white photography, the off-center, often flat and seemingly accidental compositions, and the unexpected camera tracks. I loved the intimate connection between the camera and the actress, and the narrative jumps and philosophical digressions. It all gave you the sense that cinema is jazz and anything goes, as long as you get back into the beat and the key at the right time."

"I love both equally. In Pierrot le fou it was the garish colors, footloose narrative, and moments of total ennui where nothing happens and Anna Karina suddenly breaks into song for no good reason. In Vivre sa vie it was the black-and-white photography, the off-center, often flat and seemingly accidental compositions, and the unexpected camera tracks. I loved the intimate connection between the camera and the actress, and the narrative jumps and philosophical digressions. It all gave you the sense that cinema is jazz and anything goes, as long as you get back into the beat and the key at the right time."