Above I give a brief overview of Isabelle Huppert's fabulous and fascinating career in a video recorded as a plug for my interview with her which ran in The Australian this weekend. Thanks to Christine Nestel for her clip selection and editing.
The article was granted to mark next weekend's Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF) premiere of her latest film, Copacabana (the film will screen in major cities in limited release towards the end of the month).
Due to a production error, only part of the a feature was initially posted but the entire story is now online here.
A brief extract:
Her Copacabana character, Babou, adds a glorious new side to the Huppert screen persona. Apart from being upbeat, this woman is indomitably extroverted, a word we're not used to seeing in the same sentence as 'played by Isabelle Huppert'. Where the actor's signature roles have tended towards introversion and passivity, Babou is a riot of colour and minor outrage...
....while Huppert's delicious performance is in a strikingly new register, the character's extremes are very much of a piece with her body of work. They're just different extremes.
Asked about her approach to her performance when she gets a role such as this -- her process, to used a favourite actor's term -- she initially insists that she never thinks too much about the character. 'I think much more about taking the decision to do it (the film). This is the most thinking part of my work.
'Once I have established the reasons why I really want to do a movie, you know how you are going to do it. Then comes the good part, which is more intuition. It's like a whole series of images starts to build up in my consciousness, and then when I have to do the film these images are there, and they just have to come out.'
Yet that is slightly at odds with the observation of Copacabana writer-director Marc Fitoussi that reading through the script with Huppert the first time was very helpful because she was so analytical; it was almost as if she were a professional script doctor...
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