Isabelle Huppert Quotes
"Acting is a way of living out one's insanity."
"A script, even it differs from filmmaker to filmmaker, never tells the whole story; there are always elements that need to be invented. As soon as one decides to take a role after having read the script, the various elements begin to fall into place. A character begins to take shape. And regardless of whether the information given is ample or not, it appears to one, strangely, as an apparition. From that moment, one knows whether or not this figure will be able to pass through one; if there is a meeting point."
"Body language in the cinema is thus very particular. The screen can transmit an image very different of the body. In life, we see each other by facing each other. In the cinema, one is astonished to discover oneself from another angle. But at the same time there is no obligation to look. Serge Daney used to say that the work of actors is the make movies, and the work of the spectator is to look at them."
"I think being actor is more difficult for men. The very best actors are not afraid of playing with their own femininity and leaving aside power struggles with the director. Because there's no getting around it: on a film set, it's the director who has the power. This fact is often more difficult to accept for an actor than for an actress."
"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."
"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."
"A great film is always a metaphor for the direction. A great director always says what he thinks of the cinema through his work, through a fictional story. It is always a reflection of what it is to be a director, what is a movie, what is an audience. It's always the same case. In the case of La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher), Michael Haneke talks about control and loss of control, and he was filming a woman who I felt was more identified with the situation of the director. This is a woman who controls her desire, exactly as a director controls his own desire and the audience's desire. In the film, the woman is not the object of desire, she is the one who wants to control her desire. That is why as a film - I'm not even talking about the story - as a film it is interesting because he has changed the status of an actress in a film. That is why the sexual scenes were easier for me to do because I am not set up in the usual situation of being an object of a man's desire, I am the one who controls the desire of the man. So I felt completely protected by this change of focus."
"I don't believe one ever plays characters, one plays states of mind. A character is completely meaningless to me. One goes through states of mind and tries to link them together."
"I don't think you work with Godard, you experience... Doing a movie with Godard - I have done two, which means I have spent almost two years with him - it's more like doing an incomparable experience. Just watching Godard - it's a gift for an actress to make films with him. When I say you don't work with Godard I mean that you don't go through any classical path where you build a character. With Godard it's degree zero - you don't do anything, it's a very strange feeling. And yet it is acting - it's very highly stylised and he's very directive. The reason is always very precise, there is never any improvisation. I think, finally, he manages to get everybody to talk like him. It's true! He always wants to close the sense at the end of a line. He closes the sense. It's very strange. You can't say, "I'm doing a Godard and I'm playing a prostitute," because Godard is so far away from any assembly of images you may have about that character. That's why he's a great director - more than a great director, a great thinker of cinema."
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ISABELLE HUPPERT PICTURES:
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