If he is playing a costume designer, he will spend months preparing and will learn how to cut and sew fabric. She realised long ago that one of the secrets of screen acting is minimalism. You hint at thoughts and emotions without expressing them directly. She is always very precise in her gestures but you will rarely see her raging. I am worked by the role. It is something I know about cinema and I am sure about itโฆ cinema is about subtracting. It is not about adding but about going underneath.
I just play an encounter between me and certain states of mind. Is that clear? On screen, she has a detached quality. In Elle , when she is being sexually assaulted by an intruder or is stuck in a car following a crash, she still gives the impression that she is looking in on her own life, calculating, reasoning, looking for an angle. In Eva , she gets to inflict pain, both physical and psychological, on a young client Gaspard Ulliel who becomes obsessed with her.
Even at the best climactic moments, she never loses that coolness and inscrutability which has always characterised her on screen. Because she gives so little away, it is left to us to ponder her motivations. She is endlessly mysterious. Age clearly cannot wither her either. Forty years after her role as the ingenue in The Lacemaker first made her an international star, she is still playing leading roles โ and nobody questions why.
No, she admits, she had never previously read any of the novels by James Hadley Chase, the English pulp author whose potboiler Eva inspired both the Benoit Jacquot film in which she stars and the Joseph Losey version, in which Jeanne Moreau torments Stanley Baker.
It is a really wonderful book. I was surprised because it is so modern, the way he describes the characters. She is almost a boyish character. Eva is the sixth feature Huppert has made with Jacquot. She likens him to the late Claude Chabrol, with whom she also made many films. They have the same kind of distance they keep with the story and the characters, the same kind of non-sentimental approach and the same way of placing emotions. He trusted her implicitly, as do most of the directors with whom she has collaborated.
