When Varda asked Resnais for help, he asked to see her script. She immediately brought him one to her home in the Rue des Plantes, a quarter of an hour’s walk from the Rue Daguerre. After he had read it, Hiroshima, my love (1959) politely declined this by letter. “Your research is too similar to mine,” he wrote.

But Varda was not going to be fobbed off. On the phone, she asked Resnais to watch the raw footage. Her persistence paid off. They met at the Éclair laboratory in Épinay-sur-Seine, north of Paris, where she was able to view the material for free. Since she had ten hours of material, Varda expected Resnais, a laconic figure affectionately known as the Sphinx, to watch about three of them. Varda sat four rows behind him, anxiously silent.

After about ninety minutes of the screening, during which all that could be heard was the dull hum of the projector lamp and the metallic whir of the film reels, he stood up and announced, “I think I’ve seen enough.” Varda’s heart almost stopped. The Sphinx walked silently to the door. At 6’3″, he towered over Varda. Before he left, he said something to the effect that the filming was very interesting, but that it was too big a task. “I won’t be able to do it,” he said politely. Varda remembered, “He left. I collapsed.”

Resnais surprised Varda with a call the next morning and offered her some friendly advice. “I can’t do it, but maybe I can help you get started,” he said. To ensure continuity, “you’ll have to number the shots,” he explained. In the analog age, each foot of developed film had to be manually labeled with a scene number and shot number. Resnais lent her two synchronizers, which track the length of a segment or roll of film, to help her with this job. One had a crank, the other a gear; one crank advanced a foot of film at a time, so the negative could be numbered in one-foot increments. Resnais explained that she should start from zero, crank once, and write the data on the edge of the frame. The first frame of scene 25, shot one, should be 25–1–1. One foot later, 25–1–2, etc. For the second shot, 25–2–1, 25–2–2, etc. He instructed her to buy white ink and a fine-tipped pen. He showed her where to write the numbers. It was a foreign language, but she followed his lessons carefully. Soon she would be fluent.