Isabelle Huppert, the Oscar-nominated star of “Elle,” spoke candidly about her career choices and made the audience laugh with her self-deprecating humor at a masterclass held at the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon.
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The French actor, who is also being honored with the fest’s lifetime achievement Lumière prize, revealed that she had seen very few movies when she started acting some 50 years ago. But that didn’t prevent her from working with some of Europe’s most talented filmmakers, including Claude Chabrol, Michael Haneke and Paul Verhoeven.
“We didn’t go to cinemas as much back then,” she said during the on-stage conversation with Lumiere Film Festival’s boss Thierry Fremaux, who is also Cannes chief. Claire Denis (“White Material”) and Francois Ozon (“8 Women,” “Mon Crime”), who have directed Huppert in several films, were sitting on the front row.
“When I started making films, I had seen very few. I’ve still seen few by the way. But sometimes, I would sense films even without seeing them. I don’t know if I know how to read scripts, but maybe I can recognize filmmakers and that matters obviously in the choices we make,” said Huppert, who presided over this year’s Venice Film Festival. “The choices are difficult, mysterious, it’s a mix of many things. It’s pure intuition, ultimately.”
Huppert reminisced about her experience working with Haneke, the Austrian filmmaker who directed her in several movies, starting with the highly subversive film “The Piano Teacher” in 2001. The movie went on to win two prizes at Cannes including best actress but Huppert said it almost didn’t happen.
“At the beginning, we kept missing each other,” she said. “He had first proposed to me ‘Funny Games’ and I had decided to not do it. The film is extraordinary as we know but I had found that it didn’t leave any room for the imaginary of the actress that I was.”
“To me, (‘Funny Games’) was like a completely scientific and clinical demonstration of how violence operates on the spectator and how the spectator is the plaything of this staging,” she said. After “Funny Games,” Haneke proposed her two other films that she wasn’t able to do. By the time he suggested “The Piano Teacher,” Huppert was so determined to work with Haneke that she said yes without reading the script entirely.
“He told me, if you don’t want to do it, it’s over, I won’t propose you another film. For that reason, I said “Yes, of course, I’ll do it! And then, I really read the script while I was in the plane, and there I told myself, ‘OK.’ And the next minute we were landing at the Vienna airport.”
Huppert went on to award Haneke with the Palme d’Or in Cannes for “The White Ribbon” when she presided over the jury in 2009.
Huppert is one of the high profile talent, alongside Benicio Del Toro and Xavier Dolan , who are attending this year’s Lumiere Festival.
Hupper has received accolades at Cannes and Cesar Awards and at the Golden Globes with her fearless performance in Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle.”
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Huppert has also had a busy career in theater. She’s even done plays in English in notable productions such as “Mary Stuart” and “The Maids.”
With the Prix Lumière, Huppert joins an illustrious list of past recipients, including Martin Scorsese, Jane Fonda, Jane Campion, Pedro Almodóvar, Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino and Wong Kar-wai.
Known for her portrayal of complex, emotionally restrained characters in films like “The Piano Teacher” and “Elle,” Huppert said: “There’s this sentence in ‘The Piano Teacher’ when she says, ‘La froideur, ça vous dit quelque chose?’ (‘What does cold mean for you?’) That sentence sums up everything it means to be an actor. It may seem surprising, [when you think of acting] you may think of feelings, therefore of sentimentality, of something more rounded, more appealing, but when you’re acting, you’re in a certain coldness,” she said, citing as a prime example “The Piano Teacher.”
“When she sees the young man play [the piano], she immediately understands that his way of playing will probably be his way of loving, something that doesn’t do justice to the beauty of the music and therefore of the feeling… I believe it’s the same when you’re acting; you need to be detached from what you’re playing to be a better actor.”
Huppert also paid homage to Werner Schroeter, with whom she collaborated on two films, “Malina” in 1991 and “Two” (“Deux”) in 2002.
“He was very important to me. He was a poet – it’s very hard to bring poetry to the screen – he came from the opera. He was a wonderful man, and I miss him. You couldn’t find two people who were more different – he was constantly in overdrive, for me it was quite different – and it’s incredible how much we loved each other and the way we met. He was brilliant. “Malina” was this novel on solitude and craziness, and it really felt like Werner could access this.”
Though “Malina” didn’t enjoy critical success when it screened at Cannes, Huppert recalled her confidence in the project: “The whole history of cinema, painting, and literature is made of that – that’s why you make films, it’s both a big mystery and a blessing… There are people who like it and people who don’t. That’s when you’re in the very heart of what you do, and that’s a good thing because you don’t make films to please everyone.”
Huppert recalled wanting to work with Brillante Mendoza after seeing “Kinatay,” which won Best Screenplay at Cannes when she headed the jury in 2009.
“I liked the film but found it hard to watch,” she said of its graphic violence, acknowledging that working with Mendoza wouldn’t be easy. “But the film relies on something very physical, it’s very interesting to play: instead of playing sadness, you play tiredness… It’s not a ‘psychological’ role, even though that word probably describes what I’m saying. That’s taken to an extreme with ‘Captive.’”
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