'I'M THE GRANDMOTHER of the new wave," Agnès Varda declares late in her recent phone interview with me, moving on to make a command: "Give me my title. I deserve it."

No arguments here. In 1954, years before Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut put theory into full-length practice, Varda shunned the governmentally supervised French filmmaking system to make her first feature, La pointe courte. In 1961 she completed Cleo from 5 to 7, a quasi musical on a par with her late husband Jacques Demy's Lola: the near-constant melodicism of each film takes flight in a single song performed by the title character, but Cleo distinguishes itself with its innovative playfulness regarding real-time narrative.

Forty years later Varda the filmmaker remains vigorous; her most recent work, the acclaimed digital video documentary The Gleaners and I (2000), connects her quest for images to various forms of scavenging – the resulting comic wisdom is very Varda. Her own rescue and restoration work has extended to the movies of Demy. In addition to making two Demy-related features (1991's drama Jacquot de Nantes, 1995's documentary The Universe of Jacques Demy), she has supervised the rerelease of Demy's four best films of the '60s – Lola, Bay of Angels, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and The Young Girls of Rochefort. Varda is especially pleased that Demy's Bay of Angels will be playing at the Castro, a theater she says he loved.

Bay Guardian: How do you feel about Lola's finished restoration?

Agnès Varda: The black and white is violently beautiful, and I'm proud of that. That's the way Jacques made films. When the film opened [in France], I couldn't stop thinking he'd be happy.

BG: Your Cleo from 5 to 7 and Jacques's Lola utilize Michel Legrand's music similarly. Did you plan on that?

AV: No, no, we never discussed it. Myself, I would have loved to be a singer. Cleo is a singer – some people recognize her, but that doesn't make her famous, and that's what I wanted. It was not because I wanted to compete with Jacques; I was present when he met Michel Legrand for Lola, and from that time we became friendly with [Legrand's] family. We spent vacations together – they had kids, we had kids.

I wrote the song – the sing-song words – in Lola. Jacques had wanted Quincy Jones, and Jones had said yes. He was a very nice man, and touched by the whole idea of Lola, but when the time came, he couldn't do it. In performing the song, Anouk Aimée spoke well. She didn't sing; she worked with the spaces between the words.

BG: How would you compare Jacques's Lola with the Lola characters of other directors?

AV: Jacques loved Max Ophüls, and he loved [Robert] Bresson; those are the two filmmakers he most loved. But Lola is a pure provincial story; it is not the lyrical fantasy of [Ophüls's] Lola Montès. Jacques looked to Ophüls for the movement of camera and to Bresson for purity – but only as references.

BG: Lola contains the line "God save us from gamblers," which prefigures the theme of Bay of Angels.

AV: Well, Jacques's mother was very conventional in morality: "Please don't drink, don't hunt, don't gamble."

BG: Is it true that Jacques wrote the screenplay for Bay of Angels in three days?

AV: No, I did that for [1965's] Le bonheur. He wrote fast but not that fast; he wrote it at Cannes, when I was there for Cleo from 5 to 7. At Cannes a woman asked Jacques if he'd ever been to a casino. We went. Jacques chose 19, and 19 came up – he made 35 times the money he'd bet. It really made him afraid, and that feeling of fear he brought to Bay of Angels.