I’m Not From Another Planet   

Interview by Katja Nicodemus

She was “The Woman Next Door” and seduced Jean-Louis Trintignant  in “Confidentially Yours”.  The actress Fanny Ardant talks about François Truffaut, family terror, liberal lifestyles and her new movie “Nathalie”.

The Times: 20 years ago in François Truffaut’s film “The Woman Next Door “you and Gérard Depardieu played two passionate lovers, who broke out of the bourgeois family ties. Now you are seen together again in Anne Fontaine’s film “Nathalie” as an estranged couple with not much passion left. Is this how it goes in life?

Times: But doesn’t the movie also show a bourgeois mixture of abdication and control?

FA: This woman is not driven by a madness to control but by her own perversion. She is driven by the pleasure to have the sexual activity of her husband described in detail to her even as far as his erection goes. The curiosity to investigate secret areas where one normally has no access to. She throws herself into a perverse fantasy and that brings her back to life.

Times: At the beginning of the movie you are in a nightclub, where you choose the prostitute for your husband you want to hire for him. How do you look at the women there?

FA: From my husband’s point of view. I choose for him Emmanuelle Béart, who is younger, blond and softer than me. I hunt and imitate the hunting behavior of another person.

Times: You once said, if you were a man you would go to the prostitutes.

FA: I like the truthfulness in the relationship of a man to a whore. The same is true for a woman and a Gigolo. Such relationships just deal with sex, and that is very practical. Erotic for money. Thank you and goodbye. One doesn’t need to talk, no rituals, no extortions. What do you get after the lust? The relationship, the problems, the family, the kids -- that is all terribly complicated. I’m not naïve, I know there are pimps and exploitation and trade with humans. But from an abstract and absolute point of view the relationship between whore and suitor is very clear.

Times: In Truffaut’s movie “Confidentially Yours” you are happy to pretend to be a prostitute.

FA: In this case I just want to proof the innocence of my boss, who is in hiding. I go out into the world playing detective. The important part is that I always return to the basement window and show him my legs. The prostitute outfit is part of my

Times: Was there a reason for Truffaut after the tragic love story of “The Woman Next Door” to make this a happier movie, a detective-romance-comedy?

FA: It was Truffaut’s greatest gift to discover in an actor the hidden talents. During the shooting of the movie “The Woman Next Door” we had a night scene where one only sees a shadow. It was pitch black and I joked around with Depardieu. Truffaut looked at us and said: “You look like a detective heroin”. This was the basic idea for “Confidentially Yours”. Truffaut discovered in me the seriousness, the pathos but also the mixture of comedy and seductiveness.

Times: Would you say all your parts are a continuous declination for love?

FA: I know this sounds banal, but love is the only thing I believe in, the only thing I’m really interested  in. There is no art, no painting, no literature, no opera without a great love story. Love is for me the most fascinating experience of the human existence. Look at the French cinema: Resnais, Malle, Truffaut, Téchiné. French literature: Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust. Tell me one famous French book without a love story.

Times: De Sades Justine.

FA:  Ok, but de Sade is the non existence of love so blatant, that in fact it actually deals with love. Let's say love is absent in an emphatic way.

Times: In “The Woman Next Door” you shoot yourself and your lover during sex. The heroine was seen by many critics as the personification of the tragic and destructive love.

FA: A person that goes to the limits of love is maybe asocial, but not destructive. Women who insist in there emotions are not destructive, it’s more the arrangements and compromises that are destructive. There is a great fear of independent women in society, because they represent a subversive principal. People are afraid about their bourgeois nest and small known world.  But it seams to me that conventions and culture have restricted our opinions about social behavior. The family is the only matrix of social life. But in fact we are individuals with strongly developed urges, instincts and needs for love.

Times: You yourself come from a rather conservative family.

FA: Let’s say from a very tradition oriented and enlightened middle-class family. I had a wonderful childhood. I was so happy at home that I could have laid lazily and happily on my parents sofa till the end of my life.

Times: You have 3 daughters from 3 different men and never married any of them. Were you criticized for it?

FA: Of course. It was an absolute catastrophe for my family every time I was expecting a child. I’m still a phenomena for the tabloid press. One time when I was pregnant again, there was a whole circus about it which got on my nerves that, when asked about the name for my new daughter I answered I shall call her Paradichlorbenzol. You cannot believe their reaction.

Times: Do you experience France as conservative?
 

FA: In connection with family values, yes. But I don’t see myself as a feminist. I also have nothing against marriage. But my life just turned out different. I always felt strong enough to provide for my daughters and raise them by myself. It is really possible to work and to live without depending on somebody else. In a liberal society there should be space for a traditional family with mama, papa and child, but also for people like me.

Times: Is there a limit for you in libertarian life?

FA: The limit is the suffering of the other. When I was living with my first daughter alone I was really dirt poor. I played a little in the theatre and life was really difficult. So I thought of quitting my profession and to only take care of my daughter. One couldn’t underestimate the social pressure. But an old pediatrician recommended not to give up my life’s passion to raise a child. Of course this should not turn into egoisms. On the other hand, children in our society are used as an excuse if one is too afraid to live one's own dreams and longings. Believe me, nothing is worse than to make your own children into a scapegoat for your own self denial.

Times: In the movie “Eight Women” François Ozon plays with the image of his actresses. Did you feel hurt by him when he offered you the part of the permissive outsider Pierrette? 

FA: To be honest, I didn’t want to participate in this movie. Eight actresses, weeks and weeks with seven colleagues in a kind of aquarium. But then I liked the idea of playing a person like Pierrette. A woman with a dark past, who fights against the morals of the 50s. She sang in a bar. Who knows, maybe she even walked the streets.

Times: In his movie Ozon directed a little fight between you and Catherine Deneuve. You both were Truffaut’s lovers and were made into contrary cult figures in the French cinema.

FA: The passion of the dark Ardant against the blond, cool, unreachable Deneuve. To play with this cliché was a very intelligent move by Ozon. The image is our destiny but also our capital. But it was also smart for him from another point of view to have us fight with each other. When you rehearse a fight scene you are always occupied not to hurt the other person, but we both had the feeling that there was more for us in this fight than just the movie scene.

Times: A symbolic showdown?

FA: Well, first it is important for me and I want to emphasize that I win the fight in the end. (Laughs)  Because I’m much heavier than I look. When I wrestle Deneuve to the ground and throw her over in the end, I always apologized to her as soon as the camera was cut. Who wants to flatten out Catherine Deneuve!  When we kiss each other passionately in the end, that is also a kind of reconciliation of the French cinema in itself and with its history. We take with us in this kiss all the pictures we each have ever made. And we dissolve the competition between us which was projected onto us. Maybe the thrill in this scene is really that we exist only as purely imagined personalities of the cinema.

Times: In the imagination of your directors you never seem to leave the cinema world. Anne Fontaine says: ”A Fanny Ardant  you don’t encounter on the street”. And Truffaut described you as a person from another land that doesn’t exist.

FA: This projection seem dangerous to me. I never understood what Truffaut meant by it. A director once told me I could never play a maid. But why not? I never saw myself in a certain image. There must be a maid in the world who looks like me.

Times: In the beginning of the movie ”The Woman Next Door”, Depardieu says “What does this woman want here? She is not real”. What disturbs you in the artificial cinema world?

FA: Well, what disturbs me, maybe my complexity. I don’t want to be the unreal, an alien woman,  I’m already a made-up person.

Times: What do you mean by this?

FA: For instance I could never come to this interview the way I get up in the morning. As a young girl I envied my girlfriends, who could roll out of bed or get out with wet hair from a swimming pool and just were themselves. I am a created beauty, I need the effect of a brush, color, make-up, even just to cover up my shyness.

Times: One time you must have cursed your shyness. You were standing in an elevator with Elia Kazan and you wanted to talk to him. But you didn’t dare. What would you have told him?

FA: This was a terrible moment. Still today I see the buttons of the different floors light up. And then he just left. I would have loved to tell him that  “A Streetcar Named Desire” is one of the most moving films I ever saw. That he created with Brando and Dean the erotic rebels of the movie history. Truly, I would have asked him about the bizarre camera angle in “East of Eden”

Times: How did you become an actress despite your shyness?

FA: It is an escape forward. My whole life is an act in jumping ahead. You would not believe how much of an effort it takes for me to leave the hotel room at a film festival. When one has to say the hellos and kiss all the people. If my agent would not get  me I would just stay in bed. My ideal of a festival would be to stay in bed all day and to read. A dream: only my book, the bed, the room service and I.

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