I can do 150 films and there may only be five that are
I can do 150 films and there may only be five that are memorable, but every actor knows they must work.”I was surprised by the reaction of B?t when I tell her that I didn’t like L’Enfer (Hell), which finds its way on to British screens next week Out of the blue, B?t starts chatting in English. I think that it is because I place such importance on my relationship with the director that in my life I’ve done some really bad films with directors who are great. But what is important for me is not how good the film is, but if I have fun in the two months of my life that I’ve worked on it. I’m searching for their look, their desire, and then I take a drink with them to see if I really want to take another drink with them again, sometime in my life.
“In choosing a film, the first thing I do is look into the eyes of the director. The first time that B?t worked with T?in?as on J’embrasse Pas, in 1991 She shot Strayed with him in 2004. She is scheduled to do a third film, Les T?ins, with T?in?ater this year.For B?t, the director is the most important character in a movie. In France, she was arrested for defending the rights of immigrants without official papers – an arrest that saw her lose a contract with Christian Dior.As she is keen to point out, you have to be doing something more than pouting your lips on screen and being a media celebrity to have directors of the calibre of Claude Sautet, Jacques Rivette and T?in?anting to work with you on more than one occasion. For a decade, she was the French ambassador to Unicef, a role that had her trying to focus media attention on the plight of children around the globe until 2004. In fact, I’d no longer be an actress.”In France, B?t has had far more success in convincing the public that she is more than a pretty face.
If all I’d done in by career is be like the girl in Manon des Sources all the time, I’d be really very unhappy. Playing the older partner also appealed to B?t, as it flipped the coin on the image of her that was drilled into the public consciousness in Manon des Sources.”I’m always playing against type and breaking the image of Emmanuelle B?t,” she says. “In England you don’t always see certain films that I do this in. There was a film called Les Enfants du D?rdre where I play a drug addict.” It’s when talking about her own image that B?t gives the impression that she is talking by rote “Right now, I think that there is a glamorous image It is the image of the press, of magazine covers But if you look at my filmography, these images are broken The point of acting is to get into someone else’s shoes.
For T?in?it was important to have someone who could be the mother of secondary-school children and at the same time a credible object of lust for a teenager. It turns out he was only 17.Fully aware of her image as a sex symbol, B?t was happy to let T?in?anipulate this image, just as she allowed Fran?s Ozon to put her in a French maid’s outfit for 8 Women. The boy’s friendship with B?t grows to such an extent that the British Board of Film Classification asked whether he was 18 when he shot the scenes. Their tranquillity is disturbed by the arrival of a tenacious youth.