Although she’s never shown much interest in stardom—and certainly not the personal revelations that normally accompany it—Isabelle Huppert has become famous for her dangerous and unpredictable roles in movies like The Piano Teacher and Time Of The Wolf, unsparing explorations of the animal side of human nature. Her talents matched perfectly with the jaundiced sensibility of the late Claude Chabrol, whose icy cynicism was always tinged with a lethal smile. Given her propensity for working with directors like Chabrol and Michael Haneke, it’s almost surprising it’s taken so long for her to join forces with Claire Denis, but join forces they do with White Material. Huppert plays the owner of a coffee plantation in an unidentified African nation on the verge of revolt, a woman of formidable strength and even more formidable stubbornness, unable to accept or even understand that the world she has known since birth is no longer hers. Huppert talked to The A.V. Club in New York about learning to ride a motorcycle, why she’s not interested in psychology, and her “impressionist” relationship with directors.
The A.V. Club: White Material started with you saying to Claire Denis, “I want to make a movie with you in Africa about a certain kind of woman.” Why did you want to make that movie with her?
Isabelle Huppert: Well, I wanted to make a movie with Claire. I didn’t really care what movie. Certain people you just want to make movies with. Of course I was interested in the story and in the character, but she could have taken me to the North Pole and I would be happy. I might be a little colder. Certain directors I am interested in working with in general, to such a point where initially I asked Claire if she would consider doing Doris Lessing’s first book, The Grass Is Singing. Claire kept the idea of doing the movie of a white woman in Africa having to face this emergency situation, but she totally changed the subject. She just kept the idea of the woman in Africa, but she didn’t want to do that book in particular. She thought that maybe it was problematic of the book that it was a bit obsolete, time has passed since then, and the character was much more of a victim and she wanted to create a more physical heroine, a much more active woman. This is how we ended up with this script. And she asked Marie N’Diaye, a brilliant writer who won the Goncourt Prize last year for another book called Three Powerful Women, to write the script with her.
AVC: Was there something about that idea of a woman in Africa in a certain time period that appealed to you specifically?
IH: No, that’s really Claire’s own history. It’s not my story. It’s not my history. It’s something she started to experiment on with Chocolat and then she went on with Beau Travail. She has a whole story with this country and I think she’s really entitled to speak about it. But I have nothing to do with that. Why the movie is so powerful is because the film takes place in a specific, or let’s say imaginary, country, but still specific in the continent. She speaks about belonging to a land, she speaks about what it means to be attached to a territory, she speaks about what it means to be displaced, a population that has to leave its country. And so therefore it becomes totally universal, like Shakespeare, a tragedy.
AVC: The life of a filmmaker or an actor is an itinerant one, the opposite of how you’re describing your character, who can’t imagine pulling up stakes. Do you connect with that sense of being rooted in a specific place?
IH: Yes, I think it’s part of the human being’s texture. The big problem in the world is when people are forced to be in a totally foreign context. It’s human. People create these ties and want to stick with their ties. She shows that through the strength that this woman has to stay in this land, but also the way she shows the two families. Not only doesn’t she want to leave that land, but also she doesn’t want to leave her ex-husband. Once you have created ties, even when these ties seem to be over, they are still something going on, and that’s something you want to stick to. She says a lot by putting these two houses next to each other. There was this modern house in which her husband now lives with his new wife, and there’s this older house where she lives, and these houses are nearby and it’s like there was this invisible link that still ties the two houses. In fact, they have a son together. All of this has a function, to show in a metaphorical way that all people have to stay together, and when certain political situations force you to give up that, you get in trouble.
AVC: Your character has relationships in this world, and to an extent, she refuses to recognize that they’ve changed. When men pull her over at gunpoint and demand money to let her car pass, she says, “I know you. You’re my son’s gym teacher. And your father sells seeds.” Is that determination or stubbornness or just a failure to come to terms?
IH: It’s a little bit of everything. One can think that she has almost blinkers, she doesn’t see reality around her. She’s unconscious. She has an idée fixe, as they say in French. She wants that crop to be done, she needs the work to be done, she has a certain consciousness of how things should be, and of course she doesn’t want to face reality, because also in this stubbornness, in this incredible physical resistance and capacity to resist, she has this sort of idealism where she thinks that these people should go on living together. She does not want to face the reality. She’s not a political woman, because in her own manner, her own behavior, she never treated people badly. She relates equally to people whether they’re white or black, it doesn’t make any difference to her. On purpose, I think Claire chose to set her story in the agricultural environment, because if these people were in a more urban environment, more in the business, the confusion between what you are and what you want to keep and what you have, may be bigger. You see a more pure attachment to the land. Showing it through this love of land, love of the crop, love of nature. It makes it more legitimate.