Honoured at the Reykjavík International Film Festival (RIFF) in October 2023, Isabelle Huppert gave an hour-long masterclass with questions from the audience. With humour and plenty of paradoxes, she talked about how she chooses films, why she does not really prepare, and about the directors who have shaped her career.
Every film is a first time
How many films has she made? She has no idea. What she likes about her work is that “you always start from nothing”: each character is a new journey. At the festival she presented Sidonie au Japon, a film by Élise Girard shot as a kind of road movie through Kobe, Nara and other Japanese towns, about a woman coming out of grief. As for choosing a role, she says it is mostly about the director, then intuition: beyond a good script and good dialogue, there has to be something that makes you want to spend two or three months with these people.
She does not really prepare, she says. Cinema is about the present moment, “not the second before, not the second after”, something as fragile as a candle flame. The costume is the most concrete preparation, because it shapes the body language. She does not like rehearsals either: she quotes Maurice Pialat, for whom the best films are the ones that happen before “action” and after “cut”.
From The Piano Teacher to 8 Women
A spectator found The Piano Teacher hard to watch. For Huppert, it was an easy film to make: Michael Haneke treats cinema as something precise and concrete, and the emotion comes on top of that. She tells how she first turned down Funny Games, which left no room for the actors, then a second project because she was pregnant, before Haneke came back with The Piano Teacher. She read the script properly only on the plane, “too late”. In such edgy films, she says, what makes the audience accept the story is a part of innocence in the character. On 8 Women, the small miracle was the chemistry between the eight actresses from the first day. She makes no difference between comedy and drama.
Working with directors
She has often worked with first-time directors and finds that experience matters little: even a seasoned director makes each film for the first time. She names those she worked with many times, Claude Chabrol, Benoît Jacquot, and Werner Schroeter, with whom she made Malina, scripted by Elfriede Jelinek. She describes her shoots with Hong Sang-soo, three films so far, as pure joy: tiny crews, scenes handed over the same morning, a whole film shot in under two weeks. On stage, she has worked mostly with directors who have a strong aesthetic, such as Robert Wilson.
Asked whether she rewrites her lines, she says she sometimes reshapes a sentence so that it sounds real. To young directors worried about inexperienced actors, she answers that the camera is a language: if it is in the right place, the actors can forget it. Whether some directors bring out the best in her? “No, but I know how to bring out the best in them.”