Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Isabelle Huppert

Isabelle Huppert (I)

This article is more than 22 years old
Indisuputably one of the finest actresses of her generation, Isabelle Huppert has never been afraid to push back the boundaries of what is acceptable on cinema screens and on the occasion of the release of her latest controversial film, the award-winning The Piano Teacher, the French star looked back on a remarkable life and career, including her long and productive working relationships with Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol.

Isabelle Huppert on: Michael Haneke | Annie Girardot | the audition scene in The Piano Teacher | early ambitions and career | stage and film acting | Medea | playing flawed characters

Christopher Cook: Ladies and gentlemen, Isabelle Huppert
[Applause]
Michael Haneke wanted to work with you before, is that right?

Isabelle Huppert: Yes, he wanted me to do Funny Games before, which I didn't want to do because the film was very theoretical - the way people experience violence on screen. There was very little space for fiction, it was more like a sacrifice for the actors than anything else. I didn't have the courage to launch myself... Although, I thought the film was brilliant in its demonstration. But there was no fiction, no Romanesque for the roles and that's very hard for an actor. An actor seeks, no matter how hard it is, for a little Romanesque, which was in La Pianiste. La Pianiste is a melodrama, which Funny Games wasn't.

CC: Was there ever a moment of doubt, when you looked at La Pianiste, about the film?

IH: Not really. When Michael Haneke gave it to me he said that maybe I wouldn't do it because it was worse that Funny Games. But then I read it, I didn't think it was worse, because, in a way, it has a very classical structure. You have three characters that you can easily identify with and you have a normal story, if I can say so, quite simple. So for these reasons I immediately saw the opportunity for an extraordinary role, and for a complex film with a lot of emotional potential. All the ingredients were there to make it appealing for me.

CC: How did you set about preparing yourself? When Erica first goes to see pornography, how did you prepare yourself?

IH: I think that an audience may think that it's a question of why you do films. As an actor, I don't think you go through such questioning - for us it is more _how_ you make a film, not why you do things. It's very technical. Once you have made the decision to do the film, once you have identified the desire and all the deep and personal, intimate, artistic reasons why you want to do the film, then it's more a matter of how to do things. It's very technical. All the preparation - how to do the costumes, the making-up, the hair, the shoes, how she's going to move, how she's going to walk, and that's it, you know? It's no more than this.

When you come to do the film, it is not the time to wonder why you do it. It's just how to do it. Even for the most difficult scenes, and there are difficult scenes in the film, and because Michael Haneke is such a great film-maker - I think a great film-maker is not only being inspired, but how to do it, how to make it as real as possible, knowing that it's not real. That's what it is to do films. How to approach the truth knowing that it's mystification.

It really helps you to go through difficult situations by just thinking about it as being a big amount of work which you have to solve how to do. For example, I don't feel very inspired when I act, I just act. That's it.

CC: Were you determined to play the piano in the film, because you are a pianist?

IH: I am not a pianist. I studied, as every little French girl, the piano... I studied for 12 years and then I stopped, because I was very bored with it. Then Michael wanted it to be as real as possible, with a pianist and a potential pianist. So we worked very hard. But it wasn't just a technical approach towards the piano, studying the music for this film was also a way of approaching the soul of the film, because the film is really about the soul of Schubert and the soul of Bach. What it is to be inspired by perfect beauty, by perfection. Going through this musical experience really helped us to understand the core of the film.

CC: One of the great treats of this film is having Annie Girardot play your mother. What was that like, because she hasn't made many movies recently?

IH: No, she hasn't worked much recently. I'd already played her daughter in a film called Docteur Françoise Gailland which was a huge hit in the 70s. She played a mother sick with cancer and I was her daughter. Since then I hadn't worked with her. She was wonderful, I don't think that she had seen other films by Michael Haneke before she chose to do this film, but she was just there. She's an actress, you know, she didn't ask so many questions, she just did it, you know?

CC: She transforms what could have been a monster, a terrible mother, into something very sympathetic.

IH: That's Michael Haneke's success. Each character is, at the same time, a monster and human being. He feels a lot of compassion for his characters. But it's true to say that in the script the mother appeared as more of a caricature of a monster and the daughter was more the victim of the mother, but with Annie's performance, it is more complicated. You don't know where the victim is and where the villain is. You don't really know who dominates who - but that is what the film speaks about. It talks about control and losing control, domination and losing domination. Normally the mother dominates, but I'm not sure that sometimes the daughter doesn't dominate as well.

CC: Are you suggesting that as the two of you were working in front of the cameras, this tension began to emerge? Did the performances begin to change once you got in front of the camera?

IH: No, but I think in the script the physical scenes were even more violent. But maybe because Annie is quite fragile, I couldn't bang on her too much! On paper it was harder than that. We had to adjust to... When you see a daughter hit her mother, even if it's not that hard hitting, it's already very hard. Finally it is not so much the physical thing that is violent, it is the mental feeling. That's Michael Haneke's quest - to look at the mental violence in each scene. His point is not to provoke with disturbing images, his point is to provoke because he speaks about intimacy in a way that is unbearable sometimes.

In the scene where I throw myself on her, on paper it looked like an incest scene between a mother and her daughter. Then as we shot the scene it was strange because the shocking side of the scene went away, and it was incredibly emotional and disturbing - but not for the reasons one would have thought from a reading of the scene. It was more because it became about a little girl who wanted to go back inside her mother's stomach. That's what it was about, not about a daughter wanting to make love to her mother. It was more disturbing because it touched something so invisible and deep.

CC: Erica has paid an extraordinary price just to become an adult - it is surprising that she's allowed to grow at all.

IH: In a way you are right. At the end of the film you see her walking - how do you say, staggering? She is not on the ground, she is a very fragile adult. But it is also the first time she has learnt how to suffer. She did suffer, but... She is not even able to commit suicide. In any good, romantic melodrama she should be able to die. But the movie is a parody of a melodrama and Michael Haneke does not even allow her to die as any good heroine should. But at least she is allowed to survive and for the first time in her life something comes out of her. She suffers and can see her suffering and maybe she can go on like this. Who knows? I hope so.

CC: There's one sequence that really stays with you - the audition, where the camera stays on your face virtually the whole way through. How did you prepare yourself for that?

IH: For an actress there is no greater gift than having a camera in front of you, listening to the most beautiful music in the world and just being looked at! Plus I had to jump on a plane to see my children, so we did it in five minutes. It's true! The interesting thing about Michael Haneke's direction is... OK, the camera is in several positions, long, middle and close-up. The music was actually there, which was a dream because usually you can't have the music, but I could really hear the music. I think I express on my face whatever you can feel when you listen to music that you cannot express with words - that is the difference between music and language, language is limited because words are limited. The music is unlimited. Cinema is a good medium to express this because you put a camera in front of a face and you can express whatever you want. Just the sound and the image.

But the interesting point about Michael Haneke is that, while we were shooting and I was listening to the music - it's the crucial moment when she's falling in love with him, but she's also in love with the music. So she's falling in love with him, so instinctively I would have expressed a bit more sentimentalism - let's show that she's falling in love. But Michael was so funny because he could read on my face that I was acting falling in love and he kept saying, "She's angry that she's falling in love." So you have two paradoxical feelings, on the one hand she is falling in love, on the other she is nervous about falling in love. So he said this twice during the take and he managed to introduce more contradictory feelings on my face. That was interesting, you know?

CC: The moments that often stand out in your movies are moments of repose, when you are just being observed. Is that easier than "action"?

IH: As an actress doing films, all moments are moments of repose for me anyway, it's not difficult for me to make films otherwise I wouldn't do it because I'm not a masochist, you know? Sitting on a chair listening to music is perhaps less tiring than doing the rape scene, which requires more energy. But on the whole, nothing requires unbearable energy for me, it's just a normal thing.

CC: Have you always wanted to be an actress, ever since you were a young woman?

IH: A young woman or young girl?

CC: Either.

IH: I don't know. It's a difficult question to answer because you have to remember exactly when this started. I don't know if you ever say to yourself that you want to be an actress. It eventually becomes a social function - you are an actress and you make a living out of it, but at the beginning it's more a matter of how to survive, or how to exist in a certain way.

I think being an actress is more how to cope with the fact that you can't do anything else than to express a talent. It's a way of being untalented for anything. To say, "I want to be an actress" is to say, "I can't do anything else, so let's try to be an actress."

CC: You did choose to train formally, though.

IH: Yes, this uncertainty about wanting to be an actress turns into a certitude about your incapacity, it becomes a certitude that this sum of incapacities should become something very sure. So I went to the drama school in Paris.

CC: What did you learn, do you think?

IH: Nothing. . . You have to be somewhere. When you want to be something, but you are not quite sure it's going to happen, you have to be somewhere. So let's go to school.

CC: Did you then decide that you wanted to do movie or stage acting?

IH: I didn't draw a precise border between the two. I guess I wanted to do both. I did a film very quickly, and then a lot of work for television, and then I did stage work. I never wondered whether I should be a stage actress or a movie actress. Then, for the next 10 years, I was only a movie actress, after that I re-became a stage actress, long after I began being a movie actress.

CC: We remember you at the National Theatre in Schiller's Mary Stuart. Was that a good experience?

IH: It was an extraordinary experience, to be requested by the National to play a French queen. It was a great pride for me. But theatre is always a difficult experience. For me, making films is like being on vacation, it's a nice walk. But theatre is like mountaineering. You never know whether you're going to fall off or make it to the top. And in English too. Now maybe I could do it again with less difficulties. All the classical language, it not being my mother tongue - but it was wonderful.

CC: You also did a long tour of Euripides and Medea, which you played in extraordinary spaces...

IH: But not in Greek!

CC: What made you want to be in a production for such a long period of time?

IH: It's just the normal time for subsidised theatre in France. First of all we were at the festival in Avignon, then Paris then as a tour. When you do a play in the public theatre in France you must first play in Paris and then you tour with it. It's the normal run. I like it. Before I do a play I say that I hope it's going to be for as short a time as possible but, once you do it, it is a paradoxical pleasure. One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again. It's like a drug.

It's nice to move it to various places, it's a great pleasure. For a long time I have compared cinema to music, I think cinema has a lot to do with the rhythm of music. That is why The Piano Teacher is a great film because it shows those similarities. With theatre, I like to compare it to sculpture. It is a shape that you shape. I have this funny image in my head. You can extend it, reduce it.

Firstly I did it in this huge theatre in Avignon, then to smaller places, then bigger places. You have to change the volume of the voice, give more or less. The way you have to relate to space makes it like sculpture.

CC: When I heard you were playing Medea, I thought here is another part where you murder children. What is it about these flawed women that draws you to these parts?

IH: First of all, for a very simple reason, for a very normal woman there is no reason to make a film or play out of her. The Greeks already understood that there was more interest in portraying an unusual character than a usual character - that is the purpose of films and theatre. I like to take these unusual characters and then make them as normal as possible, because we all know that the tragedy and the abnormal always hides itself behind the normal. That's what I like about it - to play with the contradiction. To try to understand how the good and the bad live together.

In a very complex way, things have improved in the dramatic field. Before you had the good and the bad and you couldn't mingle them. Now it's more ambiguous. It's more interesting to look at how the two can live in the same person. I think that films now try to understand more the relationship between individuals and society, where as before you only spoke about the individuals - the good individuals and the bad individuals. But someone like Claude Chabrol tries to make a connection between the society in which we live and the social reasons which make monsters out of some people. It is a more political consciousness about the world, and that is reflected in films now. Now they are entertaining, but also try to understand how the world works. It is a good thing for me, because it is a way of portraying these ambiguous and complex characters.

CC: Do you believe that there is something called Evil and something called God, or is that not important?

IH: It is very important, because... It's a very difficult question for me to answer, because I am not a philosopher...

CC: In terms of playing these characters...

IH: It's not like before I do a film I think let's do a little course in philosophy and wonder whether I should try and excuse the bad. But instinctively... I don't try to sympathise with my characters, I just try to empathise with them. To try to understand. If I sympathised with the characters I would make idealised, romantic characters out of them, which I don't do. I don't idealise them, I just do normal characters, not very sympathetic, but just the way they are. I think I do this in films that are made in the shape of a question, not in the shape of an answer. They just try to make a very open statement and it is down to anyone's subjectivity to find his own answer to that.

To next page.

Most viewed

Most viewed