In Mia Hansen-Løve's excellent Things to Come, the story of a middle-aged philosopher's attempt to shake off everyday tragedies, Isabelle Huppert gets to deliver a damning assessment of society's attitude to women and the ageing process. "After 40, women are just fit for the trash," her character muses.
“Ah well. I am not sure that’s really true,” Huppert tells me in clean English. “I mean, 40 is still very young for a woman. Maybe in an earlier century. But that is not true any more. You should not take it literally. She is fishing for compliments. Ha, ha.”
The advancing years have certainly not slowed Huppert. Nearly 40 years after she broke through in Claude Goretta's The Lacemaker, the French actor is still spreading throaty integrity across our screens. Indeed, she has rarely been more fecund. In May, at Cannes, her performance as a rape survivor in Paul Verhoeven's Elle generated jaw-sagging superlatives from critics. She recently squared up to old chum Gerard Depardieu in Valley of Love.
“Why would I not work?” she says with a characteristic shrug. “When there are such good opportunities, no explanations are required. When you find a great script and a good director, why would you turn it down? Unless you want to stop what you are doing? And why would I do that?”
She goes on to remark, in sunny fashion, that both Elle and Things to Come feature strong performances by cats.
“I love cats. I love my cat. But she doesn’t love me. She is really competitive. She is a woman. She loves men more than women.”
Let’s play one of those silly games film enthusiasts play. Is Isabelle Huppert our greatest living actress? It’s certainly hard to think of anyone better. It’s more difficult again to think of a contemporary who continues to do such good and plentiful work. Certainly, no other has worked so long without much tweaking her on-screen dynamic. She can still be the cold hard centre of a film. She can still be convincingly buffeted by events.
The inner Isabelle
Over that time, she has learned to handle interviews with singular confidence. She’s actually a pretty friendly sort. She will laugh resonantly at your jokes. She engages with ideas. But she has a canny way of moving the conversation away from the inner Isabelle.
“So far it’s been okay,” she says. “Not too much nonsense has been written about me. It’s mainly about the films. I am just a transmission between the world and the films. I am excited to represent these films.”
Her mother was an English teacher and her father, of Hungarian descent, manufactured safes. It seems as if Mum spotted her talent early and propelled her towards teenage parts. Huppert studied in Versailles and Paris. She made a few brief appearances on TV. In 1975, her performance in Liliane de Kermadec's Aloïse – announcing a robust actor with no hint of the gamine – secured her the first of a record 15 César nominations (amazingly, she has won only once).
“I don’t know if I always knew I wanted to be an actress,” she says. “I didn’t have time to think so much at the time. It just happened. Suddenly I was an actress. It has always been hard to figure out what led you on a path. It’s a certain amount of chance and a certain amount of will. I can’t remember ever saying ‘I want to be an actress’. I just was one. I thought it was the kind of thing that would never happen to me.”
Her introduction to American film was famously dramatic. Michael Cimino pressed a reluctant US studio into casting her in his epic 1980 western Heaven's Gate. The film ran hugely over budget and – although admired now – was a critical and commercial flop on release. Does she remember chaos on set?
“No, I wouldn’t say that,” she says. “Michael was a genius. He was the greatest living American director until his death a month ago. He was an inspiration like nobody of his generation. He was not the most classical or normal, but he was inspired. Few directors have that amount of poetry. That inspiration doesn’t come without a certain madness.”
She also managed to work with Jean-Luc Godard twice and with Michael Haneke on three occasions. Neither is said to be easygoing. “Well, I am not expecting a director to be [my] friend,” she says. “I don’t expect to be nurtured. I don’t expect any attitude from a director. I don’t care what kind of human being he is. Well I care, but it doesn’t necessarily mean he has to be sweet.”
Isabelle is finishing work on Michael Haneke's (ironically titled, we're betting) Happy End in and around Calais. It concerns a bourgeois family rubbing against the refugee crisis. "It's a view of an Occidental family being close to a different reality," she says. "That's the definition of our world today. It's quite political."
Then she is off to the Telluride Film Festival and onwards to LA and Toronto. She is shooting a new take on the Jekyll and Hyde story. She will be appearing as Phaedra on the New York Stage. The Hupperting never stops?
“Maybe then I will rest. But, for me, to film is to rest.”
Things to Come is out September 2nd
SUPER HUPPERT: FIVE GREAT DISPLAYS
The Lacemaker
Claude Goretta, 1977
Huppert hits all the marks as a shy girl driven to mental illness by her inability to engage. La Ceremonie Claude Chabrol, 1995 The film for which Huppert won a César Award. The thriller, adapted from Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone, stars Huppert as a servant plotting against their employers.
8 Women
François Ozon, 2002
A camp musical that tips its hat to the Technicolour era. Huppert is hilarious as an ill maiden aunt craving attention.
The Piano Teacher
Michael Haneke, 2002
Adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek's novel concerning a piano teacher whose sexual repression manifests itself in self-harm and misanthropy.
White Material
Claire Denis, 2009
Huppert plays a coffee plantation owner in a film that surges with postcolonial angst.
