France’s arthouse star has received her first Oscar nomination for the rape revenge thriller Elle. She explains why her character is a ‘post-feminist heroine’ – and why she wanted the controversial role that Hollywood actors wouldn’t touch

Isabelle Huppert is displeased. In a soulless hotel conference room, she is due to give a TV interview about her new film, Elle. The lighting, however, is unacceptable. Huppert peers through the camera, shakes her head. There are terse exchanges, rearranged chairs. Five minutes becomes 10. The lighting is tweaked. Her frown is now a scowl. Everything is running late. Fifteen. The crew look suicidal. Twenty. And then, apparently at random, she says OK.

You feel like applauding. TV lighting is often terrible, working on camera is what she does, the problem has been resolved without her hiding behind a publicist. The crew still look traumatised, but they’ll live. I’m next. Huppert, the heavyweight champion of arthouse cinema, is 5ft 3in, in a trouser suit, spectral pale, briskly civil. A friend who met her recently said she spent the whole conversation playing with her phone, but this time, after a single animated call – dinner plans – she tucks it into her Chanel handbag. She takes a measure of my French. We will talk in English.

Forty-six years into an acting career taking in the full masochistic, murderous range of human experience, she has reached what feels like a landmark with Elle. A film that seems like both a scandal and a masterstroke, it refuses to tell you what to think of it. This is very Huppert. “I would never turn a character into a statement,” she says, “statement” sounding like something distasteful held between her fingers. “But maybe she means more to me than another role.”

She is Michèle Leblanc, wealthy owner of a Paris video-game company (“I know nothing about video games”). The film opens with her rape, brutally carried out by a masked intruder in her elegant home. The camera moves between the attack and her cat, watching impassively. Finally, the rapist flees. She rises, sweeps up the broken glass. Then she takes a bath and orders sushi. So begins a revenge story in which revenge must fight for space among nightmare relatives and risky affairs. The director is Paul Verhoeven, the impish Dutch director whose Hollywood career includes Basic Instinct. Her performance has won an Oscar nomination, remarkably her first.

Huppert, 63, is an avid reader, she says, which is how she came across Oh …, the novel by Philippe Djian on which Elle is based. “I know Djian and he told me as he was writing, he had me in mind.” She smiles a slight smile. “I don’t know if it’s true. Maybe he just said it to please me.”

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Elle is a film you watch the way you might an unattended bag on public transport. But Huppert is serene. “The film never treats rape as lighthearted. It never minimises the crime. It is not made as a realistic comment on rape, but there is still a sense of integrity, punishment, how it touches the woman.” Yet there will be people troubled by a rape victim who later seems turned on by sexual violence, in a film that pinballs between thriller and comedy. “For sure. I’m not saying the movie was not taking that risk. But a film must be taken for what it is. There is no message.” “Message” sounds worse than “statement”.

“Here is what I liked. She is raped and confronted by this violence and she has to be the mother to a fragile son and the daughter of a crazy mother. And an ex-wife, lover, boss. That this woman is defined in so many ways, it makes her a very complete human being. She is not defined only by rape and the rapist. She is new. A post-feminist heroine.”

Would she describe herself as post-feminist? “I wouldn’t describe myself. I wouldn’t bother.” She gets up and strides across the room. For a strange moment, I think she might be walking out. She jabs at the air conditioning, cursing the cold. “I think women are the product of previous fights. Every woman should have equality with men. That should not even be a debate.” She sits again. “And men are not afraid of women the way women are afraid of men. Of course.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Huppert in Elle: ‘This woman is a very complete human being.’ Photograph: SBS Productions/REX/Shutterstock

Although Huppert is up for an Oscar, Elle – despite much acclaim – is not. The suspicion is that for some viewers, while her nomination is unarguable, the film is beyond the pale. But separating them is not simple.

Among the stills released to promote Elle is a photo taken while filming that molotov opening. Huppert lies flat, clothes torn, eyes closed. Verhoeven squats beside her, gesturing auteurishly. I ask her what was being said. “I don’t think he said much to me. Maybe something technical.” In fact, she says, they barely spoke while shooting. She liked him, she says (indeed, when he later appears at the door, an attempt is made at organising dinner). “But on set, we had no reason to talk.”

Starting work, as is her custom, she settled on a look for the character, did her research – but research, she says, is mostly just thinking. Then she was ready. “It was almost like a documentary; he decided where to put the camera, then filmed whatever I did. Once he gave me the role, he said do whatever you want, and whatever I did was good by definition.”

So she directed herself? “No, no,” she says, not unkindly, more as if I have spilt something down myself. “The director pulls the strings letting the actress do this. Hitchcock would do the same.” She settles for a shared credit. “If you ask me who made Elle, I’ll say we.”

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Yet the role might not have been hers at all. After reading Oh… it was Huppert who approached producer Saïd Ben Saïd to get it made, suggesting Verhoeven as director. The two men then moved the project to America. Efforts were made to cast Hollywood stars (their wish list included Nicole Kidman). None wanted to be involved. Finally, they returned to France, and Huppert.

“Yes, well,” Huppert says. “They tried to betray me.” A second passes. “I don’t think that. I’m joking. The truth is that they wanted to make it in America, but quickly realised it was not a good idea.” How did she feel when they came back to her? “Oh, fine.” She is up on her feet again, moving to another chair, sitting side on to me. I have to twist to see her. “I don’t want to be by the window,” she says. “Anyway, yes, I still wanted to play her.”

Few subjects interest Huppert more than her characters. Discussing them, she brightens, expands. Michèle’s complex life is made more so by an elderly mother with a taste for (much) younger men; a similar dynamic turned up in Things to Come, the bittersweet drama she starred in last year. “Yes! The mothers. It’s funny. I don’t know if you can draw conclusions, but it is interesting. Different stories but two crazy mothers, and the daughters must protect them from their craziness.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Huppert in the 1995 film La Ceremonie. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

I wonder aloud what could lie behind the coincidence. “I noticed it, too. What can we say about that?” Later, I time the pause that follows: 10 seconds. “You necessarily put a lot of what you are into what you do. But I don’t know the answer myself. So I can’t give people what I don’t have. That’s all I can say. Not that I won’t give it. I don’t have it.”

And yet, if you wanted to build your own Isabelle Huppert, you would start with parents like hers. Her mother was a Catholic schoolteacher who encouraged her daughter to act, her father a Jewish manufacturer of safes, forced to conceal his background during the Nazi occupation. Growing up in the comfortable Paris suburb of Ville-d’Avray, she would become an actor with a genius for characters whose depths were hidden even from themselves, until she dragged them on screen.

Long married to film-maker Ronald Chammah, she has a daughter and two sons, one of whom programmes the cinema she owns in Paris’s Latin Quarter. She would go more, she says, but is so often working. She has six films waiting for release. Among them is Happy End, her fourth collaboration with Haneke (she, too, smiles wryly at the title). Much of last summer was spent shooting it in Calais, before the Jungle was bulldozed.

“Everyone thinks it’s about the migrants, but it’s precisely not. It’s about a family in Calais [who are] absolutely not concerned about migrants.” In the west, we are good at being oblivious, she says. Her included? “Yes, I’m like everyone. Caught between indifference and resistance.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Roman Kolinka in the bittersweet drama Things to come. Photograph: EPA

She rarely talks politics, at least publicly. “I don’t think that’s the type I am. I don’t have much rebellion in my soul. I’m just a little bit … free.” But how is her mood, given the looming French elections? “We should do everything so the worst doesn’t happen, but if the worst happens – well. We will have to confront that.” If Marine Le Pen becomes president, she would stay in Paris? “Ha! Ask me again in April.”

Halfway through Elle, Huppert dances with an endearing clunk to Iggy Pop. In reality, she favours Bach. Still, the scene suits her punky one-offness. In another interview, she called herself a question mark. She squints at me. “A question mark? No. Not more than anybody else.” I try again. Recently, I saw her leave an onstage Q&A. A group of fans caught up with her, visibly overwhelmed. Why does she think they love her so?

“Frankly? I don’t have an opinion.” Actors often seem to need reassurance, I say. “Well, I would rather someone loved what I did than know they were hating me, saying: ‘Oh no, not Isabelle Huppert.’ I know that’s not the case, to be honest. But even if it was, what can you do? You can’t have the whole world like you.”

Another puzzle is why, given her passion for character, she has never written a script. “Because I am lazy. And actually, not interested. I wouldn’t be able to do it. Why would I pollute the world with my bad writing? I’m happy just being an actress. But directing … ” The idea floats by. “Maybe one day. Out of curiosity. Because I’m very curious.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Benoit Magimel in The Piano Teacher. Photograph: Allstar/CANAL+/Sportsphoto

I ask if she likes to people–watch. She lights up. “Oh, I’m fascinated by people’s faces. Fascinated! I can spend hours watching people. Anywhere. Everywhere.” How furtive is she? “Well, you can’t just stare, can you? So it has to be furtive.”

Does it fuel her acting? “No. Acting is imagination more than observation. I could have been locked in a room all my life and still been an actress.” She looks tickled by the thought. But she seems so sociable. “Not hysterically sociable. I told you, I’m curious. Everything is like a little piece of fiction to me. I like to peek into people’s lives. I meet them, talk to them, then step back and see them like a story. People are funny. Don’t you think so?” It takes me a moment to realise Isabelle Huppert has just winked at me.

• Elle is released in the UK on 10 March

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