Sunday, August 4, 2019

Isabelle Huppert interview for 'Home'

Isabelle Huppert


Isabelle Huppert interview for 'Home'

Once described as “French cinema’s most beloved psychopath,” Isabelle Huppert is candid, forthright and refreshingly human.


“Would I do a romantic comedy?” muses Isabelle Huppert. “Why not? But then,” she laughs a low, intelligent, faintly perverse laugh, “it would be a bit like the fable of the scorpion who asks the crocodile to take him across the river on his back and promises not to sting him. Half way across, he can’t help himself, because it’s in his nature, so half-way through my romantic comedy I probably wouldn’t be able to stop myself from doing something a little bit,” she bites her lip, “bleak - or dark.”
Huppert, after all, is no Jennifer Aniston. Once described as “French cinema’s most beloved psychopath,” Huppert relishes playing incestuous mothers, murdering post-mistresses, pornographer nuns and sadomasochistic piano teachers as expertly as Aniston does those wholesome, jeans-shorts wearing, girls-next-door.
Against the ornate soft-furnishings of a suite in Claridges, from where she has been conducting interviews about her new film, Home, all day, the 56-year-old actress looks disappointingly sane. Her pale, freckled, face is unmade up, her features are less forbidding than they appear on screen, and her strawberry-blonde hair is girlishly unkempt. Only her outfit – a pretty black silk dress teamed, rather oddly, with knee-high, grey suede boots worn over bare legs – hints at a certain refusal to conform.
In Home, directed by Ursula Meier, Huppert takes on a typically offbeat role as a mother who refuses to abandon the family home even when a motorway opens yards from the front door.
I ask, to break the ice, what she considers to be the strangest act she has ever committed on film, and as she ponders the question, a hand clamped over her mouth, scenes from her outstanding thirty-year career vie for position in my head. In Michel Haneke’s The Piano Teacher she sits in a bathtub cutting her genitals with a razor blade; in the film of George Bataille’s novel, Ma Mere, she holds her son in her arms while he masturbates. In Claude Chabrol’s La Ceremonie she slaughters a whole family with a shotgun, while in Hal Hartley’s Amateur, she wields a power-drill while dressed from head to toe in black PVC. “Nothing seems to me to be that weird,” she says finally. “Because cinema has the virtue of being able to make a blink cataclysmic, and something huge totally normal. Take, for example, that scene in The Piano Player where I mutilate myself: it’s huge on screen, but when you’re doing it, it’s no big deal”. Does it come as a surprise when her films shock? “No,” she counters, and I like her for her honesty: “What’s the point of doing it if it doesn’t shock?”
Huppert once described acting as “a way of living out one’s insanity”, a statement she still holds to be true. “Insanity is everywhere,” she expounds. “I’m not sure I’m that sane to begin with. I think I’m like everyone else, but there is a certain catharsis to acting those roles.” After filming the orgies, murders and mutilations, does she go home and enjoy a normal family dinner? “Yes,” she shrugs, “otherwise I’d have to go straight to the mental hospital.”
It must help that her family life is normal. Born in Paris to a safe-maker father, she grew up in nearby Ville d’Avray, deciding, at 12 years-old, to become an actress after seeing Russian film-maker Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying, an experience which still now, forty-five years on, renders her speechless. At 14, she won a scholarship to study drama at the Conservatoire National, before going on to read Russian at university. Her first screen role came at 16, but it was three years later that she really made her mark, with a small part in a Bertrand Blier farce, Les Valseuses, alongside Gerard Depardieu.
These days she lives quietly in the Sixth arrondissement of Paris with her three children, Lolita, Lorenzo and Angelo (named after literary, musical and artisitc figures) and their father, director Ronald Chammah. She goes so far as to tell me that Lolita is now an actress too, and that they’ve just finished filming a comedy, Copacabana, together, playing mother and daughter, but beyond that will reveal little more about her personal life. “In France we are very protected from all that,” she says, dismissing our British fixation with what her compatriots call 'le people’ with the wave of a hand. “But then again there are people who glean narcissistic satisfaction from seeing their lives talked about. I don’t have that particular weakness but I have plenty of others.” What does disturb her now, she confesses, having never had any desire to be famous is “this weird subterraneous life you see now on the internet, where your slightest movement is charted. That said,” she adds, “I’m not Elvis Presley so actually, I’m rarely recognized. If I hadn’t gone into film, nobody would ever have noticed me. I have a face which melts into the masses.”
Although this, in an hour, is the first patently untrue thing she has said, Huppert is resolutely and refreshingly forthright on the subject of longevity and looks in cinema. When I ask whether it is true that there is a paucity of good roles for older women, as so many actresses claim, she says: “That can be true for some, but life can be unfair.” The question of looks is greeted with a similarly brutal candour: “Of course looks are important for an actress – they are essential even.” Does she think it would have been possible to be ugly and have the career she has had? “I don’t really know what ugly means,” she says slowly, “because there are moments when I think I’m ugly, but cinema is a weird medium, sometimes the camera can light up a face and nobody quite knows why.”
Being one of those rare women lucky enough to possess features that have improved with age, it is clear that Huppert has made no unnatural attempts to combat the process. Does she agree with Rachel Weisz’s recent comment that Botox “should be banned for actors, as steroids are for sportsmen”? Shrewdly, knowing the exposure any comment made by an actress on this subject receives, she refuses to answer. “I have no thoughts on that question.” Well, perhaps, I venture, to fill the silence, there is less of it in France than elsewhere. “No,” she says, softening a little, “It probably happens just as much but perhaps we do it better.”
Unlike her more coquettish counterparts (Isabelle Adjani, Sophie Marceau, Juliette Binoche and Emmanuelle Beart) who have overtly flirted with Hollywood, Huppert seems to have a healthy disdain for Hollywood. “I don’t think I’ll do many more things in America,” she says. “It’s pretty rare for any French actress to build a lasting career in the US and I have never had that ambition anyway.” Does she ever covet roles in American films? “No,” she says simply. “French films tend to be much more nuanced and refined – and so there can be wonderful roles to play.”
Huppert’s career choices, it becomes clear, have never been made through any overbearing nationalistic feeling, nor through the desire to be famous or make money. It is simply, she says “because I have to act; I couldn’t not act.” She has ambitions, of course: to return to the London stage, for example, work with Sam Mendes and once again be a part of the Cannes Jury (over which she presided in May, awarding the best actress prize to Charlotte Gainsbourg for her Huppert-like role in Antichrist). But cinema, she says, frowning and looking her age all-of-a-sudden, is at a tricky point. “With the recession, it’s hard to actually make films at the moment, and even harder to have them seen by anybody.” Perhaps what sums up Huppert best, is that when asked which moment of her outstanding career she would relive if she could, she immediately asks: “In order to do it better, you mean?” No, I explain, as a highlight, a moment she is intensely proud of. “Oh,” she looks taken-aback. “Well there will be more highlights to come, so I really can’t answer that.”

THE TELEGRAPH


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