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sabelle Huppert strides into the salon, full of pep and vinegar, as you would expect. “Right now, I am completely immersed in theatre,” she says, not especially apologetically. “That’s why I might sound a little asleep at times.” It’s true: she is midway through a two-month Paris run of Phaedra(s), the classical Greek tragedy as reinterpreted by Sarah “Blasted” Kane, Wajdi Mouawad and JM Coetzee. “It is a very demanding production,” she says, and you wouldn’t want to doubt her.
But she doesn’t sound in the remotest bit asleep. One of Huppert’s principal attributes, and one that has served her brilliantly as an actor over the decades, is her wide-awake steeliness and resolution beneath the unassuming exterior, the toughness and wariness of someone who is not going to be messed with. Now 63, she has been making films for more than 40 years, ever since bagging a small role in the 1972 teen comedy Faustine et le Bel Été. (She didn’t play Faustine, but the cast also included future heavy-hitters Isabelle Adjani and Nathalie Baye.) She’s now completed more than 100 films, a decent percentage of which are masterpieces. What’s her secret and why does she keep going? Has she ever thought of packing it in?
Huppert snorts politely. “Oh, I don’t think so. You do one film after the other, and of course sometimes you have peaks, and sometimes it gets quieter, but no matter what, you keep going.” What keeps her motivated? “It has a lot to do with the encounter with the director. It’s really a process. Not all movies are successful, not all movies are definitive – but there is always a necessity for me, a reason for me to have done the movie.”Huppert has a deep, unshakeable – and very French – commitment to the cult of the auteur, the master director in whom she says a “complete belief” is a prerequisite, the vessel of a film’s “spiritual and creative power”. Huppert’s directors are the great and good of European art cinema: Michael Haneke, Claude Chabrol, Claire Denis, Raul Ruiz, Jean-Luc Godard, Maurice Pialat, Catherine Breillat, Bertrand Tavernier, Bertrand Blier. She’s made occasional forays into American cinema, too: Heaven’s Gate, Hal Hartley’s Amateur, I Heart Huckabees. Directors, she says, are her “only criterion of choice”.
“All movies are intense,” she says, “but the commitment may not be exactly the way people think it is. It’s a total engagement with the film; it’s beyond work, it’s beyond effort.”
This certainly sounds like the Huppert we are familiar with: the total-immersion actor who simulated genital self-mutilation in Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, or the isolated plantation owner facing down armed rebels in Denis’ White Material. She played a pyschopathic killer and a wartime abortionist for Chabrol in La Cérémonie and The Story of Women respectively.
No doubt principally becuase of Huppert’s involvement, Elle will premiere at Cannes in May (Verhoeven hasn’t troubled the festival circuit for a decade, not since 2006’s Black Book). Despite the fact that no one has seen it, Huppert is animated on the subject. She says it’s a “portrait of a prototype of contemporary woman” who “can handle everything, including being raped by an unknown man”. The woman runs a videogame company (and no, Huppert says, she didn’t bone up on Call of Duty to prepare for the role) and “plays a strange game with her rapist”. But she “is never a victim, which she could be, because of her past”. She says that Verhoeven, the mastermind behind Robocop, Starship Troopers and Showgirls, turned out to be a “very attentive” director, and a “very delicate” one to boot; she was as surprised as anyone else.Huppert’s frenetic workrate means that you are never far from a new film from her, and with the film world’s chaotic schedules, we are right on top of four of them. Of immediate interest is Louder than Bombs, a moody, knotted drama in which Huppert plays the small but key role of a veteran war photographer who may or may not have deliberately killed herself in a car crash. Out shortly in France is L’Avenir, or Things to Come, where she plays a teacher who has to fend off a midlife crisis after her husband leaves her. Hovering in the distance (for UK audiences at least) after a successful debut at Cannes last year is Valley of Love, where Huppert is a grieving mother opposite Gerard Depardieu, as the two perform an odd ritual in Death Valley to honour their dead son. And most remarkably of all, perhaps, Huppert has taken the lead role in Elle, a new film from seemingly dormant Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, a typically lurid thriller about a woman stalking her rapist.
Louder Than Bombs, she says, was another case of directorial attraction: she met Norwegian film-maker Joachim Trier at a film festival in Stockholm, and happily agreed to take the small-but-memorable role he offered her, “as it would be nice to spend some time together”. There’s one particular shot in the film, a long-held close-up of her staring fixedly out of a front door, that is a striking testament to her ability to hold the camera. Huppert says she finds it “horrible”, but accepts it “impresses people because it’s very intense and dramatic”.
But she lets on she pretty much blanked out, mentally, to do the scene: the Huppert gaze does not involve method acting, inner investigation or any psychological gymnastics. “In fact, when I act I don’t think about anything. My acting depends on the staging: you know, you put the camera in front of me, and I do it.”
She won’t be drawn on the subject of Depardieu, whose epic form she shares the screen with in Valley of Love, and whose increasingly raddled physique and wayward lifestyle appears to be part of the film’s fascination: “We act together very easily” is the most she’ll say.
Huppert is famous for being intensely private, presenting a poker face when asked about her political thoughts or family life. She is happy enough to talk about the Action Christine, the cinema she bought and which her son Lorenzo programmes. (“It is one of the mythical cinemas in Paris. I had the opportunity to buy it, so I did.”) But I get a taste of the freezer when I mention her husband, film-maker Ronald Chammah; the shutters slam down, and she instantly changes the subject.
We’re back on less tricky ground when I ask about her (possibly not entirely serious) suggestion that she would like to play a “power villain” in a Hollywood blockbuster. The mind boggles at the thought of Huppert sneering, Blofeld-style, or yukking it up in a comic-book movie. “Yes, why not? It would be an experience. These kinds of roles never really happened to me, but it would be interesting. It would be for my children, really; they ask me: why don’t you do this kind of a superhero? I have not been asked yet, but I would say: ‘OK.’”
Hollywood, what are you waiting for?
