An act­ing class with Isabelle Huppert

France’s great­est actress? Europe’s? The world’s? Isabelle Hup­pert is hav­ing one of the busiest times of her career, win­ning awards and crit­i­cal acclaim left, right and cen­tre. But real­ly, it’s busi­ness as usu­al for this fear­less screen leg­end, her pres­ence in a movie more often than not stand­ing in as a sig­na­ture of excel­lence. We met her in Lon­don recent­ly while she was tak­ing a quick break between film­ing scenes on a new Michael Haneke movie. The main top­ic of con­ver­sa­tion, how­ev­er, was her star­ring role in Mia Hansen-Løve’s sub­lime dis­cus­sion of age­ing, rela­tion­ships, phi­los­o­phy and cats, Things to Come.

“Mia played my daugh­ter in Olivi­er Assayas’ Les Des­ti­nees Sen­ti­men­tales in 2000. She was very young. I knew her because I know Olivi­er. I very much like my role in that film. We have a beau­ti­ful scene togeth­er in the end when she is enrolling into reli­gion and becom­ing a young nun. Very pow­er­ful, I thought. After that I was see­ing her reg­u­lar­ly because she is a friend of my daugh­ter, who is also an actress. She did a short with Mia which was very good. I’m not say­ing it’s nat­ur­al that at some point she would ask me to do a film with her, but at the same time, it was not such a big surprise.”

“Mia sent me the script and I decid­ed to do it imme­di­ate­ly. Good dia­logue. Strong sto­ry. The movie was like she is – ambi­tious. She has made a movie about phi­los­o­phy, but she uses phi­los­o­phy as a con­crete tool. It’s nev­er abstract. It doesn’t keep you dis­tanced from the sto­ry. It invites you in, because phi­los­o­phy is shown as a way of think­ing and self-edu­cat­ing. It’s a way for peo­ple to make sense of their lives. It’s also a way, in terms of nar­ra­tive, to make the film very fun­ny, as when the cou­ple break up, they’re fight­ing over their Lev­inas books rather than the cof­fee machine.”

“Fic­tion is stronger than real­i­ty. Even if you’re deal­ing with some­thing that’s very per­son­al. Fic­tion is the law. Even though Things to Come is very per­son­al for Mia, she would nev­er try to get me to repli­cate aspects of her moth­er, who the char­ac­ter is based on. She took a very spe­cif­ic sub­ject, but she knew it was uni­ver­sal enough to speak to every­body, there­fore she gave me total free­dom. Plus, I don’t know her moth­er. I nev­er met her. Actu­al­ly, she taught my daugh­ter phi­los­o­phy, so I do know her I guess. But for me, she was just Mrs Hansen-Løve.”

“I always think to myself that I should read more Schopen­hauer. But I wouldn’t find con­so­la­tion in Schopen­hauer. I stud­ied it when I was young. Some­times I wish I could go back to school. Or take one of those evening cours­es at uni­ver­si­ty. I like read­ing very much. I couldn’t get through life with­out books and films and plays. All this sub­stance. Not much hard phi­los­o­phy though. Has this film got me intrigued? Not real­ly. I was hap­py to be able to say these quotes by Goethe or who­ev­er, but no I don’t have enough time real­ly. I can only encour­age oth­er peo­ple to do so. As the film says, phi­los­o­phy gives you a lot of clues about life.”

“I’m not very famil­iar with the actu­al Actor’s Stu­dio method. I was nev­er real­ly inter­est­ed in it. Maybe I should’ve been? I nev­er real­ly saw act­ing like that. I’m just doing it. I’m obsessed with being truth­ful. My main and only con­cern is to be as truth­ful as pos­si­ble. Most peo­ple act and you can tell they’re act­ing. I want to be as close as pos­si­ble to what I think real­i­ty is. The twist is, real­i­ty is usu­al­ly a very dif­fer­ent thing to what peo­ple think it is when they come to act. Most act­ing is over-act­ing. In gen­er­al, with our bod­ies and minds, we tend to do less than more. For me, to be an actress is to wor­ry about the tini­est lit­tle thing. I don’t know if that in itself is a ​‘method’? Or if The Method gives you the answer to that? I’ve read some of Stanislavsky’s writ­ings, and when I did I thought that I was doing Stanislavsky with­out real­is­ing it.”

“In movies, you recre­ate real­i­ty, but it’s a bit more com­plex than just being real. If you have a close-up, for instance… It’s not about repro­duc­ing real­i­ty, because you would be phys­i­cal­ly mov­ing more. A close-up sud­den­ly frames you in a more min­i­mal­ist way. That’s what I like about movies. You express things dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing on where the cam­era is. Expres­sions take on dif­fer­ent forms.”

“It doesn’t both­er me. It’s just a bit more hec­tic in terms of prepa­ra­tion. Of course, when you start a film you have to work before, you have to try on cos­tumes – tech­ni­cal prepa­ra­tions, but it’s not a prob­lem in terms of elab­o­rat­ing the role or think­ing about the role. I can have ten roles in my mind at the same time. It doesn’t both­er me. But I usu­al­ly have two – the one I’m fin­ish­ing and the one I’m starting.”

“First, I’m not the only per­son to car­ry the film. You have the direc­tor and all the crew. A char­ac­ter is not an indi­vid­ual cre­ation. It’s being car­ried and shaped by all these oth­er ele­ments. For exam­ple, I’m start­ing a film soon. I have no idea what I’m going to be doing, but it doesn’t both­er me. The role is very strange, a com­e­dy made by a young French direc­tor called Serge Bozon. I did a film with him called Tip Top. It’s hard to think about a char­ac­ter in Bozon’s uni­verse, but I’m con­fi­dent. We’re prepar­ing the cos­tumes right now. By doing that, some­thing under the sur­face is revealed. And then, it will just… happen.”

“I don’t like to read a script too much. I read once, and then I for­get a lit­tle bit. There’s noth­ing you can real­ly pre­dict about doing a film. It’s more about hav­ing a total trust in a direc­tor. It’s more about the chem­istry. And then, every­thing is possible.”

“You can have hours of dis­cus­sion with the direc­tor, if he or she wants to. Or have no dis­cus­sions at all. In prin­ci­ple, I don’t like dis­cus­sions dur­ing the movie. But if it hap­pens, it hap­pens. I don’t care. These long talks before the movie hap­pens leaves me a bit sus­pi­cious about the need to talk fur­ther. What will the impact be? But some peo­ple need to do this.”

“It doesn’t both­er me. I like it. Michael Haneke some­times does a lot of takes. A lot of takes. The oth­er day we did around 40. It usu­al­ly hap­pens in long sequence shots when you have to put every­thing togeth­er. A lot of things were hap­pen­ing in that shot. The rhythm is very impor­tant. Paul Ver­ho­even would also some­times do a lot of takes, for Elle. I can’t believe I would ever not accept it or be reluc­tant doing it. There are so many dif­fer­ent types of moment in movie mak­ing. Espe­cial­ly in very emo­tion­al scenes, you real­ly feel like you’ve hit the point and I can under­stand actors feel­ing like they’ve giv­en every­thing they have and that they couldn’t ever do it any bet­ter. This is what cin­e­ma is about – it’s com­plete­ly con­tra­dic­to­ry, as it’s about repeat­ing things end­less­ly, but it’s also about man­u­fac­tur­ing and cap­tur­ing a unique moment. We would call this the ​‘mag­ic take’.”

“I’m just fin­ish­ing Michael Haneke’s film now. This is also the rea­son for my pres­ence here in Lon­don. We had two days of shoot­ing here. This movie is com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent from what I did on, say, The Piano Teacher. And cer­tain­ly dif­fer­ent to Amour. It is an ensem­ble film, with lots of char­ac­ters. He calls it a ​‘freeze frame’. It’s a por­trait of a fam­i­ly, and every­thing that implies. It’s a very quick view of a fam­i­ly. There’s no psy­chol­o­gy. It’s very fac­tu­al. Just the facts. It sounds like Code: Unknown, but it’s dif­fer­ent to that. It’s cer­tain­ly more like Code: Unknown than The Piano Teacher, where you fol­low a sin­gle char­ac­ter. The aim is that every­one who sees it will be able to cre­ate their own film.”