Isabelle Huppert brushed off any suggestion that she’s prone to making bold artistic choices, telling members of the press on Monday at the Thessaloniki Film Festival that she’s “not brave enough to take any risks.”
“Working with all the people I’ve been working with was not about taking risks. It was very safe,” Huppert said. “You don’t take risks working with Paul Verhoeven or Michael Haneke. No matter what the role is, you don’t take risks [with them].”
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Appearing at the prestigious Greek fest, where she’s being honored with a career-spanning tribute and an honorary Golden Alexander Award, the Oscar nominee and two-time César Award winner opened up about why she’s drawn to characters full of “ambiguities and complexities,” dishing on memorable performances in films including Haneke’s Cannes jury prize-winning “The Piano Teacher” and Verhoeven’s “Elle,” for which she was nominated for an Academy Award.
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Downplaying the challenge of inhabiting some of her more complicated roles through the years, Huppert praised her many artistic collaborators, insisting: “Working with people like this is never really difficult.”
“The difficulty would be to work with somebody that you don’t really understand, or someone you don’t trust,” she said. “It’s really a lot about trust — it’s the key word in the relationship between an actor and a director and a film. If it doesn’t rely on trust, it’s very difficult to do.”
Fifteen films from Huppert’s oeuvre will be presented this week at the Thessaloniki festival, including Claire Denis’ post-colonial drama “White Material,” Marc Fitoussi’s comedy “Copacabana,” in which the French screen icon stars alongside her daughter, Lolita Chammah, and Thierry Klifa’s political drama “The Richest Woman in the World,” which premiered this year in Cannes.
Also screening this week in Thessaloniki is “Heaven’s Gate,” Michael Cimino’s follow-up to his five-time Academy Award winner “The Deer Hunter,” in which Huppert appeared in one of her earliest roles. The actress noted how the troubled Western epic — a notorious flop upon its release in 1980 — has received a belated critical reappraisal, something she described as “part of the history of moviemaking, and part of the history of art in general.”
“Now the movie is equally famous for its failure as for its success, but the success came over the years. When the movie first came out, it was really a big disaster — as the New York Times said, ‘unqualified disaster,’” Huppert said. “Of course, that was not encouraging for people to watch it. And I think, in a way, Michael Cimino never really made it [past] that failure, because it was a failure.
“Over the years, whenever I watch the film, I realize to some extent the movie was really what we would call an auteur film. It was so personal. It didn’t really — it did care about the audience, but…there was nothing that made the movie really more [accessible] for the public,” she continued. “And also, probably the political content was hard to be heard at the time. And I think the movie would be even more interesting to be released now. Probably it would be more accepted now.”
Looking back on her career, the actress expressed few regrets about her acting choices, though she quipped that she “would have loved to work with Alfred Hitchcock, but he was already dead when I started being an actress.”
“We forget about [our roles] very, very easily,” she said. “I’m maybe very unfaithful to the films and the roles. The minute you do it, it’s already behind you. Of course you care about the movie to be loved and liked and well-received. But in terms of how we keep it, there is not enough space to keep all of them.”
Appearing in conversation with Thessaloniki head of programming Yorgos Krassakopoulos, the French screen star fielded questions about the checkered progress of women in European cinema (“We still have to improve”), the war in Gaza (“There’s always not enough noise about any suffering in the world”), and whether she and the movie business have changed since the beginning of her prolific career.
“I don’t think I changed anything between now and the moment I started. I think I always had the same kind of curiosity,” she said. “What changed maybe is the way movies are being shown, that’s for sure. You have so many ways to watch films. But of course, the best way and the one that has to remain is here, in a movie theater, on a big screen. Any other way is, for me, not the best way.”
While Huppert has made her fair share of bold, provocative and unpredictable choices across her much-feted career, the 72-year-old insisted her work is far from done, saying: “I’m always looking for the unknown.”
“I think whenever you start doing something, it’s like a jump into the unknown,” she said. “This is always what I seek. And usually what I find.”
The Thessaloniki Film Festival runs Oct. 30 – Nov. 9.