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PREMIÈRE January 2004
WORDS NEVER SPOKEN
A CONVERSATION WITH FANNY ARDANT
DURING THE PREVIOUS ENCOUNTER, SHE CONFIDED TO US, JUST BEFORE LEAVING, THAT SHE HAS FAILED IN HER LIFE. ASKED TO SIT DOWN AGAIN AND EXPLAIN, SHE SAID NICELY: «NO, ANOTHER TIME, PERHAPS.» TAKEN AT WORD, ON THE OCCASION OF THE RELEASE OF "NATHALIE", THE FILM OF ANNE FONTAINE, IN WHICH SHE PORTRAYS A FIFTY-YEAR-OLD WOMAN WHO WOULD NOT RESIGN TO THE TRIVIALIZED ADULTERY OF HER HUSBAND, THIS TIME, FANNY ARDANT AGREED TO GO FURTHER. TO TRY ANYWAY...
Interview by Ghislain Loustalot
PREMIÈRE: In interviews you often repeat the same things...
Fanny Ardant: Yes, I am obsessive...but it doesn't matter, I always hide the essential part.
Maybe we could try?
Today? I have too many dark thoughts...
I can see.
Oh...I’m not always like this, you know. But then, it’s my nature, I must admit.
Why today, actually?
I don’t know. It’s a re-emergence of something buried, like a layer of sediment that suddenly rises to the surface.
You had a nightmare which haunts you?
No. A nightmare, strangely, would be good for me. For me the dreams are as important as reality. I like the idea that my life is shared between the real world and that of the invisible. I want to believe that the loved ones who are gone are returning to visit me, that they are still here.
These ghosts...It’s like in La Chambre verte (The Green Room)...
Yes, I love it.
In fact, it’s a topic which you approach as often as you speak of literature...
I have built the moral philosophy of my life by drawing from books. I know I have already said that, but I can’t invent anything else. I prefer literature to cinema.
Your parents never helped you growing up?
Yes, of course, but I had no friends. The books spoke to me. Very quickly, I learned to blend the feelings. I was too young when I read, J'irai cracher sur vos tombes, Le Rouge et le Noir...Those books were good for me and bad for me at the same time.
Concerning love, who taught you? The books or your parents?
The books! Not necessarily the masterpieces, though. I liked very much those stories where the men are handsome and arrogant and the women are poor and modest, and when they cry, they have diamonds on the edge of their eyelashes...Do you understand?
The Harlequin collection comes to mind!
That’s it! [laugh] But understand me, love was a taboo subject at home. We were all from the spontaneous generation. [laugh] At home, I had never, never heard any talk of the forbidden relationships, the dangerous relationships.
Really? There was nothing about that in your parents' conversations?
No, nothing... Oh, yes, once. I had to be 12 years old then, I heard my father talk about an ambassador of France in Sweden. He formed a perfect couple with his wife. They had five children and were expecting the sixth. At a dinner at the embassy, she met a man and she left. I was marked by the story of love at the first sight, I asked my father very concrete questions about it.
One has the impression that you react as someone who hadn’t been loved enough in her childhood.
Oh no, I was loved very much by my parents. Perhaps too much...
How is it possible to be loved too much? One is never loved enough...
Let’s say that I was brought up in a perfect world. I believed in the absolute love between a man and a woman, but not in the marital misery, nor in the bourgeois hypocrisy. I saw the model of my grandfather, and of my parents, it was like an enchanted dream. Then, well... I have never denied it, I just had the feeling of not belonging to it. Inevitably, it is my fault.
Did your parents help you make choices?
We talked only about the things that were forbidden. From that time on, I thought it was easier to define yourself by the negative. For example, when the literature and cinema, although I didn’t go there very often when I was a child, proposed to me the stories of jealousy, the housewives with their rolling pins, it filled me with horror.
You never became jealous?
No. But it’s because I chose my camp, like in literature. The heroines were a little bit dark, solitary, who had failed in everything, the lost love. I am not far from them.
Then, so how do you react when a man is unfaithful to you?
I like it. Because it breaks this kind of smooth mirror... And then, it's predictable because I don’t have any big idea of myself. But, you know, I have never been afraid of the social gossips. I have never been afraid of adultery. One has an impression that it’s a total sin; me, I think they are social vitamins.
It doesn’t destroy everything?
On the contrary, it would reconcile. Well, it’s my way of looking at: Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, yes...I have much apprehension regarding the marital life, I have never thought of fidelity as a quality. Though, I like spaghettis very much and I could eat them all the time [laugh]. So, all that I love, I love always. I never grow tired of it. But, strangely, when I think about fidelity, I never think about myself, I think about the others. And then, the more you love someone, the more you think : “Okay, you won’t keep that man for yourself, confined like an old can of sardines. He will live, he will tell you about the world”.
At the time of Callas Forever, you told me: “I have failed in my life”. Without thinking too much about it, I thought you wanted to say “I have failed in my life since François Truffaut’s death”.
No, it would be reassuring. It would give a form to things. In fact, I was referring to an accumulation of dreams and absolutes that were never achieved. At my age I can say that: “I have never achieved anything, everybody’s gone...” It’s also a sensation... My life is not the one I had dreamed about.
How did you dream of your life?
It’s difficult to say. I see it as a form in which I could slip into, but where I wouldn’t live.
I don’t understand.
I had an idea, just like that...A retinal impression of...blossoming. Concrete, tangible.
Have you thought of consulting a psychiatrist?
No. What would he say? You are looking for failure, Madam, you are looking for deceptive love. I don’t want to go inside that, it’s more complicated. There are things you can’t control absolutely. Well, I agree that I have never had a vocation of the abnegation or of the sacrifice, and I have failed a lot because of that. But it’s me. I claim dissatisfaction. The days when I am extremely positive, I don’t give a damn about what I have failed. At least I went through all that.
So you would say: "I am finally content with having failed in my life the way I have failed it” ?
Hmm...Well, I would rather say: “I don’t regret anything”. Period. I’m not afraid of the future, nor of the past. I live with my inconsistencies, my anxiety, but I live in the present. For that reason, I like my profession. Because it unites the present.
Other than that, do you often live in the imagination?
Oh yes. Sometimes, I go down from my home to a Vietnamese restaurant, to hear the sound of my steps on the wooden floor and feel the rapture and the melancholy of all that I won’t do, because I hate traveling. It’s a fleeting feeling, but it’s enough for me.
You don’t like traveling?
Yes. Though, I lived in Sweden with my parents, and then later in Italy where I have also filmed a lot. When I’m in Rome, I feel that this city is mine. I adore it!
Moreover, physically, you look a little Italian...
Really? Rather Arab, no? Or from the region of Caucasus. I think, in fact, that my paternal grandmother came from that region of the world. She died when she was very young. In the Limousin, in the house of my parents, I had a picture of her, very thin, very mortal. She was dark, dark, dark and very tall. Though everyone measured one meter and fifty...
Where was that?
[laugh] Ah, in the Limousin! Well, in my family they are all small as well. My sister, for example. She is blonde like mom and she has blue eyes, like everyone in my family. Except my dad who had yellow eyes. He was in the military and I thought that his khaki uniform had faded on his eyes. Me, I have dark eyes. I imagined that perhaps I had been adopted. This unspoken, clandestine side, I liked it.
Sometimes, one could say that you regret the way the relationships between men and women have evolved...
No, because for me, that is it, I don’t belong to that anymore.
What? Have you given up?
Yes. Therefore, everything becomes a gift. Everything that happens is good because I don’t want anything. Do you remember that film titled Déjà mort [Olivier Dahan 98]? Do you understand? I am like in reprieve. Like a little lady on the platform of a station. Before, I took the trains; now, I say “Well, me? You have to put me in the train.”
And professionally?
Everything is intact. It’s crazy, isn’t it? I have always worked on the desire, without thinking about it. And it hasn’t changed.
In Nathalie..., you rediscover Gérard Depardieu. It could have been, if they hadn’t died at the end of the film, Bernard and Mathilde, the characters of La Femme d’à côté [François Truffaut, 81], reunited after 20 years. Except now, they are in a story of unfaithfulness.
For the character that I play, it’s not the unfaithfulness which is important, but this sentence, which kills, “It’s normal, you have to get used to it”. The thing which motivates her reaction is not this little infidelity, she is more intelligent than that, no, but it’s whether to resign or not to resign herself to the fact. I’m not even sure if Anne Fontaine would agree with that. But, it’s me as well!
In La Femme d’à côté, there was a romantic spirit that was close to the literature...
Oh no!
But when they kiss before she faints...
But when she kills him, she kills herself, and that, is the literature or François? It was François! To finish the film by the death, life like the stories in the news, it’s all that he loved.
And the story of Mélo [Alain Resnais, 86], it doesn’t exist in real life, does it?
So much the better! For me, Bernstein [Henry, the author of the play, Mélo is based on], is the Third Republic. Those little women, who are unfaithful to their little husbands. I hate that! On the other hand, the feat of explanation of jealousy told by André Dussollier in the close up where it lasted an eternity, is extraordinary.
How did you meet Alain Resnais?
Resnais? It was after La Femme d’à côté. I felt like the queen of the world, invulnerable. Resnais phoned me, life belonged to me. I had a small car, with which I was going to the set of La vie est un roman and I got lost in the fields. Everything was good at that time.
Then there was L’Amour à Mort.
Yes, the film, which moves you. It’s one of the rare roles where I couldn’t base it on anything personal. This character of the female pastor is so altruistic and serene. She has a tremendous hold on life, and love of fellow men.
L’Amour à Mort was released in 1984, the year of François Truffaut’s death...
Fortunately, I had filmed it before, if I hadn’t, I don’t think I would have done it. That year, Costa-Gavras, who saw very well the state that I was in, insisted on engaging me to do Conseil de famille. He was very kind, and he had class...
The character you play in L’Amour à Mort, is she the opposite of you?
It means that I am a selfish maniac, because I’m always afraid of the shadows of the overly sentimental. I prefer to say as Marguerite Duras: “Destroy!”. But the development of the religious man fascinates me, because I’m fascinated by the abandoning without return.
Mélo was your last film with Resnais. Why? You could have been part of the group, couldn’t you?
Yes, why? Why...do you have any opinion?
No.
Neither do I.
Have Resnais never phoned you again?
No, I haven’t been a part of his world.
Did you feel hurt?
Oh no! That's the way it is. Life is vast.
Three films with Resnais, it counts, nevertheless...
Yes. But actually, maybe the last one came full circle. I remember when Resnais came to me with Mélo and said: “I’m afraid you will refuse, but it's my challenge, to get back the same ones (actors) as in L’Amour à Mort. Would you like to read it?" And I said to him: ”But I’m not going to read it, I’m going to say yes, because your idea is to get the same ones, like a cocktail, and to shake it in the opposite direction”. Voilà, it was a done deal. He wanted me to rediscover the four from L’Amour à Mort. It couldn’t continue forever.
There are a few directors with whom you worked several times...
Scola, twice. François...twice.
Two of the most beautiful ones if I may say so...
... [Silence] Please turn off your tape recorder...
(...)
I’m very sorry...
That’s ok. Let’s continue.
Let’s talk about more trivial things. You are conscious about your appearance, do you buy a lot of clothes? It’s a question that relaxes...
[Laugh] When I’m abroad, I fantasize about the things I will buy when I return to Paris. When I’m back, it’s over. My life is filled with imagination.
Do you have a favourite fashion designer?
Dolce & Gabbana.
Not a very classic one, after all...
Contrary to the idea that one may have of me...like one always thinks that my shoe size is 40.
It's bigger?
[She bursts out laughing] No! Smaller than that, see!
Are you a clothes addict, or not?
I like to see what’s new at Dolce & Gabbana every year, but I don’t spend my days on it. Anyway, it bores me after a while. When I look at all these collections, I think: “But how long will it last, these new bags, these new shoes?” It drives me crazy.
Do you keep all your clothes?
No, I give them away.
Do you lend your clothes to your three daughters?
No, I don’t like lending my things. The thing you lend is the thing lost. But it doesn’t stop them from pinching things from time to time.
Do you sometimes borrow their things?
No. But, I didn’t use to take my mom’s things. Except once. I pinched her ivory bracelet, which I still have. I can still see myself...little girl...looking at her looking at me. It’s a little of her on me now that she’s not here anymore.
One has the feeling that there was a long eclipse in your career...
At which moment? Before Pédale douce [96’]?
Let’s say that it was as if Pédale douce and the césar award for best actress was a comeback.
Yes, perhaps. I hadn’t made many popular films. There were only the small confounding films, without much success, but I don’t disown them. I like to make a small film which will remain in a city for a week, but which will be released in Antananarivo or in Beirut. It’s better than six million TV viewers. One day, on the streets of Barcelona, someone tells you: “I saw this film”. And it’s amazing. You can’t believe it.
Has it really happened to you?
Yes, and you can’t even imagine how happy it makes me. Then, in spite of failure, I think it's worth it.
The character of Eva in Pédale douce is not like you...
Why? She is a dark person, solitary, tormented, she waits for her Prince Charming. Though, admittedly, Gabriel Aghion chose me initially because I was not a joker. But I love to evolve in the mechanics of comedy. I have never performed in any Feydeau, but I would like to.
Is it true that you didn’t want to take the role of Madame de Blayac in Ridicule because she’s a bitch?
No. I remember I said just after the filming of Le Colonel Chabert [94’]: “I’m not going to play all the countesses of the repertoire!” That’s all. Then I met Patrice Leconte in a Trocadéro café and I laughed a lot. It made me want to work with him. I had a great deal of pleasure getting into the character of Madame de Blayac. I like this kind of characters, the spiteful ones, who come up to the ring, who are not afraid of taking the blows.
Like the character you play in Nathalie...
Yes, she’s a manipulator. But it’s for survival.
How was your work with Emmanuelle Béart, who plays the title role in this film?
Very good. We exchanged some acerbic lines in 8 femmes, and I liked her. I like her hidden fragility.
And with Anne Fontaine, who has a reputation for being rather harsh as a director?
Harsh? Oh no, not at all! She knows what she wants and she has a strong personality, and it suits me very well. I like to be directed, manipulated, if I wasn’t, I would always be putting the same trademark to my work. I want to be a suitcase which one picks up on a carousel. Furthermore, I would have liked to have worked with Pialat, to live a destructive experience.
If we talk about experience, how did you find yourself in La Débandade [99’]?
Claude Berri is part of my past.
What past?
With François. When Claude came to me, we had just crossed path once, it moved me. Immediately, I felt very good with him. There was something which made us very close to one another. Maybe it would have been like that if Chabrol had phoned me. I like the melancholic vitality of Claude [Berri]. It was incredible that he wanted me to be his wife. I had fun making that film, even though I was very sad at the time. My mother had just died.
On the set of 8 femmes, there was a real battle of the egos, wasn’t there?
It was a balance of terror. There wasn't any manifest ego, if there was any, it would have bordered on the ridiculous. I was the last one to arrive, like arriving after a battle. I was an outsider, I had never worked with any of the actresses who were present there. On the first day, I found myself in front of them performing my choreography, and it was a bit like: "Well, go on, show us what you can do..." The only thing I could hang on to, was the glance of Catherine [Deneuve], which was full of kindness. She understood that my heart was about to explode in my chest.
Your relationship with Catherine Deneuve was easy then?
Very easy. I had never worked with her before, but I liked her. Because she has a link with François, like Claude Berri. When I was stretched out on top of her, in the scene where I kiss her on the lips, I said to her: "I'm not as thin as I look, am I? Watch out..."
Let’s get back to the ego problem, it exists in your profession...
An actor without ego, what’s that?
It means that you go as far as you could go to negotiate your fee or the size of your name on the poster, don’t you?
Mama mia, never! I’m not able to do that! I remember my first conversation with my agent, Serge Rousseau. I said to him: “The system is not good. When you have a big part to perform, you should be paid little, and if you have a small role, you should be paid a lot for it...to compensate for the grief.” You don’t play Hamlet, but a gravedigger, bingo!”
How did he respond?
He said: “You’d better stop talking about it!”
Do you have any friends in the cinema?
I have been criticized for not maintaining relationships with the people with whom I had worked.
So?
So, no. I mean, yes, there are people like Josiane Balasko or Josée Dayan, whom I like, but I never see them. If by any chance in life we rediscover one another, then, everything would start again. Gérard [Depardieu], for example, I never see him. Though... But what then, should I give dinners? When I did, it was horrible. I was more nervous than during a dress rehearsal, afraid of their disappointment. I can’t cook, I'm hopeless. It has happened to me, during dinners at home, I escape and shut myself in my room.
Are you often invited to dinners?
No.
What do you do in the evenings?
I read. And I play the piano.
Nice for your neighbours!
When I was working on the role of Callas, they suffered.
Why have the young directors not called you?
Who, for example?
Corsini, Desplechin, Assayas.
Yes, indeed... However, I played in Change My Life [02’] with Liria Begeja, and in Tony Gatlif’s Pleure pas my love [89’], which I adored, but it sold few tickets. The day the film was released, Tony went to the theater, but there were only ten people who stayed to the end. After the film, he invited them all to dinner. Brilliant, isn't it? Anyway, it’s like that, there isn't a reason for everything. You don’t know why someone wants you.
You never make the first step?
Absolutely not. I was always chosen, it’s mysterious, it’s a power. I have never been right from the start in a project. François said to me that in the 60’s, there were the actresses who made their career through the producers and the others through the directors. Me, I would opt for the director, it’s he who makes a film. Anyway, I have never had enough success to be impressed by a producer.
Do you say goodbye to your roles easily?
Yes. On the other hand, there are the moments when I was in danger during filming, which is unforgettable. A difficult scene, you think you will never manage to do, and your adrenalin goes up. When I watch the film, I remember everything.
Did you have other projects with François?
An adaptation of Nez de cuir, a novel by Jean de la Varende. And then, François...
Yes...
I remember that he was working on a story of Choiseul-Praslin. He used to say that he needed to work on other things in order to avoid writer’s block.
(...)
It wasn’t an interview, was it?
No.
A conversation, rather... ■
© FANNY ARDANT Online Translated by Aleksandra Darsant Edited by George Sand
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