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Interview: Isabelle Huppert Talks Elle and Things to Come

The actress discusses her roles in the latest films by Mia Hansen-Løve and Paul Verhoeven and why she’s been lucky in her career.

Interview: Isabelle Huppert Talks Elle and Things to Come
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

Isabelle Huppert was hours into a series of back-to-back interviews when we met in New York’s Regency Hotel earlier this month, yet there was no hint of exhaustion in her intelligent, lively gaze, or the precise, often detailed answers she offered up between sips of coffee and bites of food. Like most of the characters she plays, she was magnetic in part because she appeared to be so self-possessed, forming opinions about other people without much caring what they may think of her. At the same time, she was kinder and warmer than her characters usually are, and her sly sense of humor hinted at an ironic perspective that may keep her from taking anything—including the hype that’s been heaped on her over the years—all that seriously.

The hype has been piled high for good reason. One of her generation’s greatest female actors, Huppert is also one of the most awarded in her native France, where she has been nominated more than any other for the César, the country’s national film award. In a career that spans well over 100 films, she’s played a wide range of characters, but nearly all share the quiet, near-feral intensity and steely resolve that have led many of the best directors of her time to cast her in their films—and often, as she pointed out on the day we met, to make her character the center around which the entire plot turns.

Huppert was at the center of two films featured in this year’s New York Film Festival: as Nathalie, a philosophy teacher who experiences an unexpected freedom after losing nearly everything she thought she loved in writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come, and as Michèle, a rape victim who refuses to be victimized in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle.

With only her accent and, at times, the way she structured her sentences betraying the fact that her fluent English isn’t her native language, Huppert talked about why she’s been lucky in her career, the pleasure she found in playing an intellectual with a rich personal life in Things to Come, and why it was important to her not to think too much about Michèle before playing her.

It’s difficult for an actress to create a body of work that reflects her values and standards of quality because actors are so dependent on other people to create a character that’s right for them, hire them to play the part, direct the film well, etc. Yet you recently told The Guardian, after having made more than 100 movies: “I’ve never blushed at any of the films I’ve made. I’ve been very lucky.” Why do you think you’ve been so lucky?

I think I was lucky enough to get roles which were central. In most of the films I’ve been doing, my characters were the pivotal center of the story, and that really helps. You have such a large space to express the little nuances. You can act as you would as a writer in literature, which is to go in one direction and then to contradict the next move with a different one.

But I wonder how you got those parts to begin with. I’m sure luck played a part, as it does with all of us. But there were other factors, starting with your talent, obviously. You seem to be good at evaluating scripts and directors.

Evaluating directors more than scripts, actually. Because this remains my main theory of choice: directors. If it wasn’t for Paul Verhoeven, I wouldn’t have done Elle. If it wasn’t for Mia Hansen-Løve, I wouldn’t have done Things to Come. If it wasn’t for Michael Haneke, I wouldn’t have done The Piano Teacher. That’s my belief in cinema: It really comes from one individual in particular, and it’s a very personal statement. And only with that very personal statement in front of me am I able to come up with my own personal statement, which hides somewhere within this director’s statement.

These type of authors, directors—I was looking at them, but they came to me. And whether it’s Claude Chabrol or Michael Haneke or French filmmaker Benoît Jacquot, with whom I’m going to make another film soon, they really put me at the center of their films. And no matter what I was doing was good [laughs], because that’s the way the character was infusing the main story.

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Your daughter, Lolita Chammah, is also an actress. First, I’m wondering how you felt about that when she started exploring the profession: Were you happy or worried or some of each?

She’s a fantastic young actress, and because she’s a very good actress I’m happy that she’s an actress. We did a movie together called Copacabana. She was really wonderful in it.

Have you given her any advice about how to build a satisfying career as an actress, or do you just count on her learning by watching you?

No, I can’t say I really give her concrete or precise advice, but maybe she’s seen what I do and the way I do it over the years. I think you transmit to your children by example, but not by exact advice, you know? It’s more about trust and encouragement and example, I guess, most of the time.

You’ve served on the jury at Cannes a few times, and you’ve worked with directors from all over the world—which is another way that you’ve chosen your directors, I think? By looking at the whole world, not just France?

Yes, I like to make the potential wider. I did that from the very beginning. Ever since I started being an actress, I made movies in Italy—well, that’s not so far away, but I made movies in Hungary, in Poland, everywhere. And more recently I went to Korea to work with the great Korean director Hong Sang-soo, and with Brillante Mendoza in the Philippines. Soon, I think, I may go to Argentina to work with an Argentinian director, but it’s too soon to say. But I have this curiosity, I would say, to go abroad and make things everywhere. It pleases me.

You’ve worked with some very interesting American directors too.

I’m pretty proud of all the American directors I’ve been working with, because I always follow the same line as I would follow in France—meaning that I work with authors, you know, in the sense of the word that we praise in France. That means Michael Cimino and Curtis Hanson, two great directors who, unfortunately, passed away recently, and David O. Russell and Ned Benson and, back to earlier times, even Otto Preminger. That was an improbable film [Rosebud], but still, working with Otto Preminger! And that includes also Joseph Losey. At the time I did a film with him, it was a French film, and he had left America a long time ago, so I’m remembering him last. But still, he was American, as everybody knows.

In talking about how people react to Things to Come, you’ve commented on the fact that some people are surprised that Nathalie has both an intellectual and a domestic life.

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Yes, that’s a preconceived idea. Mia Hansen-Løve put it in a funny way yesterday when she was asked [at the New York Film Festival press screening] about [Nathalie] rocking the baby at the end, and she said, “Don’t you think you can think and rock a baby at the same time?” I mean, those people have such weird ideas, you know? It’s not so common to show intellectual people on screen, I have to say, unfortunately. The way philosophy is used in the film, it’s not very abstract, and of course philosophy can be very abstract. But in this case, philosophy is more like a project of life: It leads to [Nathalie’s] sensitivity to beauty, her sensitivity of course to intelligence and to ideas. It gives joy to her. And the few quotes [from philosophical texts] that run during the film just make you think about very simple things like “Do we need people?” or “How can we be happy?” That’s what philosophy, most of the time, in the simplest conception of the word, is about.

Don’t you think her study of philosophy also helps her to accept the bad things that happen to her with equanimity?

Of course. Yes. Absolutely. It’s not something that keeps her away from people. On the contrary. So [philosophy] becomes very attractive in the film. It’s also a tool of transmission between her and her students. So for all those reasons, it was really nice to be that philosophy teacher.

So, do you think people are surprised to see Nathalie having both an intellectual and a personal life just because she’s an intellectual, not because she’s a woman?

If you see people with a certain intellectual level, people tend to have these preconceived ideas about them, and put them in a very abstract world that is not related to normal life. So I think it’s really good to show this kind of environment on screen. It’s unusual. Plus, Things to Come was really successful, which is good news also. That means, God, you can still relate to a certain quality of thinking.

In Elle, the media has led the public to believe that your character, Michèle, may be a psychopath like her father. I actually felt that was possible, based on things she did and the way you played her. When you were playing the part, did you think about keeping that possibility open?

No. We never thought about that, neither I nor Paul. And when I hear comments like that or I watch the film, it’s still hard for me to understand that she could be taken for a sociopath or whatever you said.

Psychopath is the word used in the film.

We give this information about her father’s past as a possibility. Obviously what happened in her childhood was very special, and she’s shaped herself and built her own persona from that original trauma. And also, maybe, from carrying the guilt that she might have been an accomplice to her father when she was burning everything in the house after he committed the murders. It’s only a hypothesis. I don’t know. I think she’s beyond this kind of definition. It’s not even something that occurred to me when I did it.

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Actually, very few things occurred to me as I was doing the role, you know? It was like we had this material which was like fire, burning as we were doing it. If we had started the film questioning whatever she is, I think [it wouldn’t have worked]. I think the great strength of the film is that it avoids any kind of genre, so it’s not stuck in any kind of psychological study. It’s not a thriller because it’s a comedy, I would say. But it’s not only a comedy. It doesn’t exclude multiple other layers, which gives so much depth and so much questioning and so much disturbance to the film.

Michèle has secretly established a very, very weird relationship with this man. Whatever you think the reasons are, at the end you have to confirm the fact that the man dies, and even if Elle isn’t from the beginning the classical revenge movie, where she’s a Bond girl taking a gun and shooting the guy, still there’s some kind of morality and sense of punishment, because he dies, you know? And she doesn’t seem to have any emotional reaction to the fact that he dies. Whatever she builds as a relationship with the man as the story goes by, it’s a mystery as to exactly what it is, but you can be sure that it doesn’t exclude attraction, it doesn’t exclude desire, it doesn’t exclude a very personal confrontation to violence that she confronts at that moment and that probably takes her back to her past. The fact that she has no emotion when he dies is, for me, essential. It means that that story was set in a very special space, and this is where it is and this is where it will remain, in a way.

Back to what you said about how you didn’t try to psychoanalyze Michèle before you started playing her. For years, you said you don’t play characters—that you just play moments and states of mind. What’s the difference between building a character and playing moments in a character’s life?

When you do a role like this, in these types of films, and that doesn’t concern any film, you know, but this kind of film, where the character is so pivotal and the whole story evolves around the character, you really step into someone’s life and you really get into someone’s psyche. I like the film to be almost like a living experience. I think the spectator looks at the film the same way I, as an actress, was myself discovering the story as it was being filmed. If I think too much about it before, then I give answers to things that I’m not supposed to be giving answers [to]. Because in life, you don’t know what you’re going to be doing in the next moment. You start one day and you don’t know how you are going to end up the day. So I like to keep this opening when I do a film. Day by day, scene by scene, I go my way. That’s why I don’t really think about it. It’s probably because I’m very lazy too. [smiles]

Elise Nakhnikian

Elise Nakhnikian has written for Brooklyn Magazine and runs the blog Girls Can Play. She resides in Manhattan with her husband.

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