By James Mottram & Jessica Mansfield
From Paul Verhoeven – the Dutch director of Basic Instinct and Robocop – Elle is a typically heady walk on the cinematic wild side. When Michele Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert), the CEO of a company specialising in violent video games, is brutally raped during a home invasion, she goes about her daily business as if nothing has happened. Deciding not to report the crime, she instead embarks on a cat-and-mouse pursuit of her assailant – a dangerous game that will feed her own sadomasochistic desires. A perverse, psychologically complex, and sometimes surprisingly funny film, Elle won huge critical acclaim at this year’s Cannes Film Festival – not least for Isabelle Huppert’s mesmerising performance as the film’s wonderfully terse and hardened protagonist.
We just heard that you were interested in this film from the very start, before Paul Verhoeven even knew about it. What drew you to the story? “The book is fantastic, and the role is fantastic. When I read the book first, I thought that the role was very complex because it doesn’t really give clues to her behaviour, and that’s always nice to play – to really create suspense. There is something very Hitchcockian in the way that people behave, because it’s always unexpected. The script was great too, and Paul holds up this sense of suspense. You go with her. You experience with her the secrets of someone’s behaviour in a way, because she’s never predictable, but she also never gives explanations to what she’s done.”
In what way did you contribute to it? “I collaborated just in the sense that I was doing what I was doing, and because Paul, by his way of filming, gave me all the freedom in the world to do whatever I wanted. So I really took the role, and took the character. It’s the best way to do a film like this, when you feel like you can create the perfect match between you and the character.”
It’s 100% a Verhoeven film, but it’s also 100% Isabelle Huppert. Do you know each other well? “I had met him twice before. I had met him through the screen first, when I was very young, because I had seen Turkish Delight, and I was completely overwhelmed by the film. It was such a great, great film, with this very mysterious mixture of emotions. Then eventually, I met him in Los Angeles a very long time ago. We had dinner with several people, and he was very intimidating, because for me, he was the director of Robocop and Starship Troopers, and he was a very Hollywood director too.”
How much did it challenge you to play a character that’s going to be raped, and who has a kind of ambiguous reaction to the aggressor? “I immediately thought and understood that that’s not the central topic of the film. The movie cannot be reduced, and is not reduced, to that, and when I watched the film, through people’s reactions, I could tell that nobody thinks that the film is just about this strong woman being raped, and falling in love with her rapist! It’s more complicated than this, because there were so many stories around, and the movie says so many other things about violence. And of course, rape is the centre point of that violence, but family violence, heredity, transmission, family relationships, professional relationships, friendship, loving relationships…the movie is very rich and complex.”
Did you know anything about the video game world at all? “No, I didn’t, but I thought it was a brilliant idea that I would be pretending to know about it. The aesthetic of the video game world is a perfect metaphor for the violence of our world, and there is something very arbitrary in the way that things happen in video…with no connections, with no explanations.”
Both this and The Piano Teacher suggest a hidden sexual and emotional life for these characters. Was that a particular acting challenge? “Well, I don’t want to sound cynical myself, but the kind of emotions that you go through, as an actor, are so much different from the emotions that you go through as a spectator. I know it, because I’m an actress, but I’m a spectator too, and it’s completely different. So, it’s not that I resent anything when I do a film, but it’s not far from being true. It’s more a pleasure. Even with the more dramatic scenes, it’s more the pleasure of the work too. But I don’t feel anything. I don’t prepare, I don’t feel, I just do it. It’s very easy for me, and I have no emotions doing it.”
Do you always have a couple of other nice scripts waiting for you, around the corner? “Well, I’m going to start a new film with Michael Haneke soon; it’s called Happy End.”
Can you tell us something about Happy End? “Well, the only thing that I can tell you is that it takes place very close to Calais, where all the migrants are. And we are a family, and that’s all that I can tell you, because that’s all I know. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Mathieu Kassovitz are in it too.”
What was the atmosphere on the Elle set like? “It was very light, even though Paul is very obsessive…as all great directors are. He reminds me of Michael Haneke for that. And also, technically, he works in a very special sort of way, which I never did before. He works with two cameras, but not two cameras like one on me, and one on someone opposite. He has two cameras on the same person, with just a slight little angle difference, of course. It’s two different cameras. And the whole movie was with these two cameras, always. It’s very special.”
How does it affect your performance? “It didn’t affect it. Or maybe it did, but in an unconscious way. It certainly did in a way, because with two cameras, it was more relaxing. Because one was a further angle, and one was always closer on your face, so it was a nice feeling that nothing was going to get lost, because you always got different perceptions of your face.”
Have you seen any good films lately? “I just bought a cinema. My son is running it and programming it. It’s the L’Action Christine, one of those small, repertory cinemas, which are the pride of Paris. We only screen old movies.”
Are you going to programme a season of things yourself? “Well, we do festivals, and recently there were films by John Ford, and all sorts of things. So recently, I’ve seen many films by John Ford.”
Elle is released in cinemas on October 27.
