Audrey Tautou interview: 'I don't like the spotlight'

Audrey Tautou has a discreet silver band on her wedding finger, but any inquiries as to whether or not it is an engagement ring are met with coquettish smiles and girlish giggles and, finally, an answer – of sorts. “I don’t know,” she teases. “Is it?”

That the 37-year-old actress is playfully private is perhaps not that much of a surprise. Since she won the hearts of just about everyone when she took the terrifically twee lead role in Amélie 13 years ago, she has done only two English-language films – The Da Vinci Code, with Tom Hanks, and Dirty Pretty Things, with Chiwetel Ejiofor – instead focusing on movies from her French homeland.

“I think people find it a mystery that I don’t have these Hollywood fantasies,” she tells me. “But I don’t want to have a career there. I don’t want to live in Los Angeles. The city depresses me! It is too flat. There are too many cars. And I don’t get that many offers from America…” She scrunches up her button nose and smiles cheekily. “Not interesting ones, anyway.”

We meet in a dark London hotel room on a bright Saturday morning. She is here to promote two new films, both of which are the definition of interesting. In Mood Indigo (out on 1 August) she plays a young woman who discovers she has a water lily growing in her lung. So far, so not normal. It is set in a surreal version of Paris and was directed by Michel Gondry, of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind fame. There are strange elongated limbs, jumping shoes, a piano that turns into a cocktail maker. Her character’s husband has to embark on a series of increasingly crazy jobs to buy the flowers that he has been told will keep her alive, and as her health fades, so does the colour on the screen.

In the comedy Chinese Puzzle (out on 20 June), Tautou plays the love interest of a man who has recently been left by his wife. It is set in New York, though is almost entirely in French, aside from the bits where Tautou’s character has to speak fluent Mandarin to a group of Chinese executives to whom she is trying to pitch (she learnt the language especially for the film).

It is a movie about the crises we face as we hurtle towards 40, and Tautou’s character, a harassed single mother of two, is desperate for the leading man, an ex-boyfriend, to get back together with her. “But there is no spark,” he tells her, as they lie in bed after an earth-shattering sex session in which she has urged him to, “Go deeper!”

“You weren’t like this when you were younger,” he says to Tautou’s character. “But when I was younger I didn’t know what I wanted,” she replies. “And now I do.”

Does that resonate with Tautou, I wonder? “Well, I can’t say I use this kind of vocabulary,” she says with a laugh. “I think that when you get older you know better what’s good for you, and you are more trained to be able to assume your choice. But with me, I knew pretty early what I wanted to do.”

That seems to be because the whole Amélie experience showed her exactly what she didn’t want to do. “What was very oppressive to me was that suddenly I became an attraction, you know. And for me, I am not somebody who likes to have all the spotlight. I love being an actress, but I really don’t have that interest. So it was something that was really weird, because I like to live like everybody. I like to take the subway, and suddenly I couldn’t do those little, simple things, you know?

^{Audrey Tautou in the 2001 hit film Amélie}

"And also, I was supposed to like it. You are supposed to have a dream of walking the red carpet. But I’m really not like that. Because fame is… I don’t think it is something interesting or precious. What was weird for me after Amélie was how people look at you. It moves all your relationships and sometimes even your intimate ones, and you don’t understand why suddenly everything around you changes, because you are exactly the same person.”

Tautou is sipping from a latte that is almost as big as her. She is tiny, five-foot-nothing, wearing jeans, brogues and a T-shirt, the only vestige of her stardom being a Prada bag in the corner of the room. She has a goofy, endearing laugh that is like a drain and entirely at odds with her fine, elfin beauty. She used to be the face of Chanel No 5 – she also played the designer in the film Coco Before Chanel – and describes Karl Lagerfeld as being like “Louis Quatorze! He is a real character.” But now, “I have been replaced by Brad Pitt,” she says with a Gallic shrug. How did that feel? “I was proud!” she cackles.

The actress has fond memories of her early career; times were far more innocent than they are now. She remembers the first time she went to a party at Cannes, largely because she turned up in a sarong. “I didn’t have anything to wear. It was tough to work out what was going on around me. I thought the sarong was nice, and it was the only thing I had that could look like a skirt, you know?” She chuckles at the memory. “And I was thinking that an actress today would never be like that. Because now it is big business. A designer is going to give her a dress.”

She describes the experience of Amélie as being like a “big fame tsunami. And after that, I really decided to keep it quieter.” She mimes zipping her lips. “I didn’t want to surf on the wave. I let the wave go and I refound my life slowly.”

^{Tautou at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where she was Mistress of Ceremonies (GETTY)}

If Amélie had happened now, in the age of social networking, “I would have moved to the moon.” Again, that delightfully gawky laugh. “If I had had to live my life on the internet like that…” Tautou shakes her little head. “No, no, no! I would never have done cinema again. No, no, no. I feel we are in the century of comments. On Twitter, everyone comments: ‘I like that’ and ‘You’re an a—’. There is all this agitation. All that anyone cares about is the buzz. It’s weird, really weird.

“But the good thing now is that you can be forgotten very quickly,” she says, brightening. “You know if you stop working for five years you are done. Nobody will remember you. So I think that is reassuring.” She hasn’t worked for a year and a half now, and though she is about to start shooting a film with Bérénice Bejo, the award-winning star of The Artist, Tautou seems to prefer the medium of theatre.

“When I do this it is wonderful for me because I have the responsibility to go to the theatre, to be on time, to do my make-up, my hair. It’s great because I feel like an adult. But when you are an actress for cinema, they treat you a little bit like you are an infant. They think you can’t look after yourself, that they have to protect you. But I am a very independent person so I don’t need someone to carry my bag.”

Tautou was born in central France, the daughter of a dental surgeon and a teacher. She has a brother and two sisters and sees them a lot. Would she like children? “I am very attached to this idea of family,” is all she will say. The subject of boyfriends is off-limits, though she does tell me, with a dirty laugh, that “for a couple to last you need an honest camaraderie and solid eroticism”. She says she has no interest in the affair of François Hollande and Julie Gayet – “I really, really, really don’t care. It’s his private life, and I don’t have the right to know” – and loves living in Paris in part because of French privacy laws. “To have a personal life is the minimum freedom you have to give to a human being.”

^{Tautou with Romain Duris in the film Mood Indigo}

And yet she is happy to answer other questions, and does so with real thoughtfulness. When I ask her to describe herself in a couple of words, she spends almost 15 minutes hmmming and ahhing until she gets it right. “I think the first word would be ‘wild’ – not like a party person, more in that I am untamed. I don’t like to be squeezed into the system and I don’t like superficial conversation. I am very bad with that. I don’t have the talent to talk for nothing.”

She says she is a perfectionist too. She has been trying to write some stories and do some photography, “but the thing is I am very, very, very slow. As an actress my career went fast, but with my other artistic projects it is the opposite.” Does she like being able to work at her own pace? “No!” she squeals. “Not at all! For me it is a struggle. For me it is terrible. I don’t feel confident enough to show my things because I am very perfectionist. It is like torture. I am like the cat who is eating its own tail. I am sure people think, ‘She keeps talking about these projects, but it’s been 25 years now!’ Ahahaha.”

On her way over to London, she left her laptop on Eurostar. She hadn’t made copies of any of her work, so she said to herself: “OK, if you don’t find it, that’s a sign that you have to” – she mimes slitting her throat – “and if you will find it, that means that you… Have. To. Finish. It.” She pauses for dramatic effect. “And I refound it!” She giggles in complete delight.

Before we part company we talk a bit more about Mood Indigo, which was based on a book, Boris Vian’s L’Ecume des Jours, a cult classic in France. As a teenager, she loved it and she says that bringing it to life was “a crazy experience. Michel has so many ideas in a second. We felt he was trying to, how do I say..?” Tautou thinks for a moment. “...destroy the traditional ceremony of film-making. He wanted us to forget where the camera was. There was all this stop-motion animation. While we were doing the shooting we felt like we were eight years old.” There is even more laughter. And I get the impression that eight years old is exactly the age Audrey Tautou feels most of the time.

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