Isabelle Huppert: Ice Maiden Cometh
After three decades and 90 films, Isabelle Huppert says that great roles with great directors are increasingly rare. The French star tells Kaleem Aftab things ain't what they used to be
Monday, 4 August 2008
After three decades and 90 films Isabelle Huppert says that great roles with great directors are increasingly rare
Isabelle Huppert is late. I sit waiting for her for an hour, in a hotel bar situated a stone's throw from her house in the fashionable St-Germain quarter of Paris. When she finally arrives, she excuses her lateness by saying that she woke up late. Faced with this kind of behaviour, the turbulent character she plays in Private Property would disappear for weeks in a sulk. I, however, just admire her serene chic.
It's necessary to recheck her age as well – she's recently turned 55 and looks terrific. Remarkably, she's as striking now as she was 30-odd years ago in films such as Loulou – slim-framed, with freckles that stand out on her preposterously pale skin, and eyes that light up when she speaks.
Since bursting on to the scene in the early 1970s, she has appeared in 90-plus films, and been showered with acting accolades: her wins include a Bafta for The Lacemaker, two Cannes best-actress prizes (for Violette Nozière and Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher), two Volpi Cups in Venice (Une affaire de femmes and La Cérémonie, for which she also won a César), and a Silver Bear in Berlin for 8 Women. Directors looking to cast a frosty, stubborn, wronged woman have her number on speed-dial. In complete contrast to her celluloid persona, however, she's jovial, candid and delightful company.
She is also acutely aware that some critical rogues mistakenly dismiss her talents as one-dimensional because she so often plays the silent type. With a shrug of her shoulders, she says: "But if I do have a stereotype, I am my own stereotype. It's nice to change but you cannot totally give up who you are, even if you have a big temptation to do so." There is no other actress who carries quite the same ethereal quality. Her glare freezes the camera into submission, and it's with this same assurance that she tells me exactly what she looks for in a performance. She lectures: "Because of the current fashion for biopics, in the past few years there is this view that acting is the ability to be someone else, which I don't think it is. Now, the more visible a performance, the better people think it is.
"Acting has more to do with expressing yourself, and that doesn't mean you have to be always the same. For me, acting is incarnation, it is not imitation, although imitation can be great." Huppert is as stubborn and firm in her beliefs as the characters she plays.
This acting philosophy is evident in Private Property, a family drama in which Huppert plays a mother living with her college-age twin sons. The delicate relationship between them is unbalanced when she announces that she wants to sell the house that they received as part of a divorce settlement. Huppert, once again, plays a stubborn, sad, tearful woman unwilling to compromise. She reveals that it was the family dynamic revealed in the script that led her to work with the up-and-coming Belgian director Joachim Lafosse. "Sometimes, the children behave like they're her parents and she behaves like she was their child," says Huppert. "She is pushed into the position where she is the dependent person. That makes the relationship between her and her children strange. Why the kids are so reactive when she says she wants to sell the house is because they understand that their mother is going to escape and they don't want her to. They're all like animals."
Huppert sees starting a relationship with a new director as a big risk. She doesn't like the fact that she has to give up so much power to the film-maker in how the film, and her performance, will turn out. She states: "The cut of the film is the proof of how much the director really loved you. When you see the film in its final version it is more difficult being an actor."
It's a surprising confession that she hates having her scenes cut, so I ask for clarification: "Well, sometimes you think that you've done certain things and then you watch the film and it's not there. It's not your own film when you see it. It's the director's film and it's always disappointing. Even this film, Private Property, I wasn't happy when I first saw it. I thought Lafosse cut too many scenes and it wasn't focused enough on my character."
Yet Huppert's presence dominates Private Property, and she's only off-screen when her character leaves town. In screen time, her absence is no more than a few minutes. She wants to clarify, however, that the amount of screen-time or lines she has is not a deciding factor when it comes to picking parts: "When I choose a role, I'm always searching for some tracts of cinema," she explains. "What I mean by 'cinema' is the idea that cinema remains a personal language created by a director. I try to look for that, and it's becoming more and more difficult. All actors dream of doing great roles with great directors but this is increasingly rare. There is a bigger quantity of films being made today but the quality is far lower. That's why when you find someone like Claude Chabrol [they've collaborated seven times] or Michael Haneke [three times], you just want to keep them because they're great directors. My feeling about the movie industry today is rather pessimistic."
This pessimism, and fear that directors will do her wrong, is why Huppert continually works with the same people. Her English is strong enough for her to have been cast in several English-language films, and, curiously, when she has appeared in American films, it has often been with directors going through a difficult phase. She starred in Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, a commercial disaster that bankrupted United Artists. She caught Hal Hartley on the start of his downward spiral with Amateur. Then there was David O Russell's I Í Huckabees, a film best remembered for a leaked out-take of the director and actress Lily Tomlin arguing with each other, with a bemused Huppert in the middle of the cross-fire. Once again, Huppert sides with the actor: "He [Russell] deserved it. It was funny but it was fair. For us it was just a little event. It was one day among many others when the same thing happened."
Asked if she feels that acting can be taught, she replies: "It is not something you can learn. What is difficult is to make good choices. The big question is not how to act, but with whom to act."
She then claims never to have read a book on acting. I tell her that I've read some Stanislavsky, and Huppert immediately contradicts herself. "I read that. Of course it is very interesting. Whenever I've read anything by Stanislavsky I've always thought that I act in the style he is describing. I learnt nothing. I just thought of it as a confirmation rather than an education. I know exactly what I'm talking about."
When she actually said this, it seemed less bumptious than it might appear on the page.
It's clear that Huppert feels that she has reached some sort of crossroads in her career. Hardly surprising, given the limited number of parts written for women of a certain age. Although she may not look 55, I get the impression that her current frustrations with acting are because she is starting to feel older than she looks.
'Private Property' is out on DVD today
Quintessential Huppert
Loulou (1980)
Huppert and Gérard Depardieu (above) are at the top of their game as director Maurice Pialat's lovers. She's from a well-to-do family, he's the bit of rough. A younger, more amenable Huppert simply dismisses Depardieu's antics with a beguiling, bemused smile.
Une affaire de femmes (1988)
Claude Chabrol's Second World War family drama is tailor-made for Huppert and her uncanny ability to become a blank canvas. The mystery here lies in trying to work out what her character, a wronged wife, is really thinking. As usual, Huppert gives very little away.
The Piano Teacher (2001)
Huppert excels as the repressed Erika Kohut, a respected teacher at a Vienna music school, where she's known for her cold, determined exterior. In fact, she leads a secret life of self-mutilation that's deeply affecting.
8 Women (2002)
As if to prove that nobody can do Huppert like Huppert, the actress sends herself up in François Ozon's wink-wink murder mystery, in which a host of France's best-loved actresses, Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant included, play up to their own public image. Naturally, Huppert is "Miss Sang-froid".
I Í Huckabees Out-take (2004)
Much more popular than the film itself, this outtake became the stuff of legend. As the director David O Russell and Lily Tomlin are barracking each other at the tops of their voices, Huppert, sitting near Tomlin, stares straight ahead, seemingly oblivious to the row raging around her. Without a single movement, she somehow shows that she's on Tomlin's side.
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