Standing in the hushed environment of the Louvre’s Salle des Etats we are surrounded by a host of eye-popping masterpieces. Arguably the most famous painting in the world, Leonardo da Vinci’s enigmatic
Mona Lisa, sits serenely on one wall, securely held within its Perspex case, while at the opposite end of the gallery hangs Veronese’s vast
Wedding at Cana, its rich red and blue tones dominating the entire wall. In between these two powerful paintings stands Audrey Tautou, fiddling with her short raven hair. She is dwarfed by her surroundings, her slight 5ft 3in (1.60m) frame clad in black from head to toe, and she looks in need of a cigarette. Even Tautou, who alongside Mona Lisa is one of the most famous women residing in France, must make sacrifices. Today she’s sacrificed her packet of tabs.
“Ah, the Mona Lisa,” chimes the 29-year-old French actress, her gaze, like ours, roaming across the famous lady’s mysterious visage. “Isn’t she magical? The best thing, though, is to be alone with this diva at night. That is truly special.” We’re inclined to believe her; the Salle des Etats is a truly awe-inspiring place. To gain access alone, and at night, one would have to be an employee or someone special. Tautou, of course, is the latter.
“Being here at night, you really feel as though you own the museum,” she continues. “Every single masterpiece is there just for you. But now, having been here at night, there is this intense atmosphere. You already feel this mystery that is in the story.”
That story is, of course, Dan Brown’s Grail-blazing pulp thriller The Da Vinci Code, which has been adapted for the screen by Ron Howard, the director of Apollo 13 and Cinderella Man. Tautou plays the role of Sophie Neveu, the cryptologist and female lead, opposite Tom Hanks’s hero, Robert Langdon. To shoot the key scenes that open the book and, indeed, the film, Howard, Hanks, Tautou and crew secured permission for a week-long night shoot in the Louvre.
It was not Lady Luck who facilitated the film-makers’ request to shoot in the Louvre; rather it was the first man of France. President Chirac invited Howard and the producer Brian Grazer for coffee and croissants and, during an hour-long audience, granted his approval, no doubt invoking the ire of the haughty French academics. Whether Chirac is a fan of Howard’s films is unclear, but reports suggest that the President proffered some advice to his guests. Apparently, he suggested that Jean Reno (who plays the police captain Bezu Fache) should command a better salary and proposed that his daughter’s chum should play the role of Sophie. Asked her opinion, Tautou offers a Gallic shrug.
“That was definitely a joke,” she says. “There was an article and when it got translated I think the person who did it made those comments sound much more serious than they were. I mean, would Jacques Chirac really do something like this, getting involved with casting and Jean’s contract? Would he have the interest or the time?”
Whatever the truth of the matter, Howard and Grazer eventually settled upon Tautou for the part of Sophie. By the time they were searching for the female lead, the book, optioned by Sony Pictures for $6 million (£3.2 million) soon after publication in 2003, had become a phenomenon. Consequently, the part of Sophie became one of the hottest gigs in town. And Tautou was not the obvious choice; Howard had originally favoured one from the tantalising triumvirate of Julie Delpy, Sophie Marceau and Juliette Binoche.
“I don’t think I was at the top of Ron Howard’s list,” Tautou admits. “I just thought it’d be a great experience for me to go to LA even just for 12 hours, so I could audition with Tom Hanks. I took my camera with me and asked if I could take a photo of Ron and Tom, just so I could prove to my sisters that I’d met them.”
This shyness and lack of confidence has accompanied Tautou since childhood. She grew up in Beaumont, a hilly area 350km (220 miles) south of Paris, the eldest of four children (a brother and two sisters). She was raised by middle-class parents — her mother is a teacher, her father a dentist She discovered that acting was her calling. On leaving school she enrolled at a Parisian university to study literature (Victor Hugo and Oscar Wilde are among her favourite authors) and continued to pursue amateur dramatics until her parents agreed to send her on a 15-day course at the highly regarded Cours Florent acting school in 1995. Tautou was hooked, dropped out of university with her parents’ blessing and landed work on French television.
Her break in films followed in 1999, when Tonie Marshall cast her as Marie in Vénus Beauté (institut). Her turn as a young beautician who finds love with a 60-year-old former pilot won her a César, the French equivalent of an Oscar. But it was her performance as the heroine of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain that shot her to international stardom. Playing the kooky dreamer, she was nominated for another César and Hollywood beckoned.
Tautou, however, turned her back until now. She has worked in English only once before, on Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things in 2002, and while her second project with Jeunet, last year’s A Very Long Engagement, was a critical success, it did not attract the same attention as their first. “I figured that maybe it would be interesting to try a blockbuster, but I never thought it’d happen to me,” she says.
Tautou may yet pay the price for her decision; she is fiercely private. She finds no pleasure in seeing herself plastered on billboards or gracing magazine covers. Any talk of a man in her life is quickly quashed, and the only time that she’s truly happy to see journalists is when they allow her to take their picture with her camera (although it seems unlikely that this is to prove anything to her sisters). And yet today she carries herself with good grace, suffering the burden of publicity with a wry smile and a twinkle in her large brown eyes.
In The Da Vinci Code (for the seven or eight people who have not read Brown’s tome), Sophie teams up with Langdon, an American professor caught up in a murder case and propelled upon a quest to discover that the Holy Grail is in fact a manifestation of the sacred feminine, Mary Magdalene. There is a great deal of erudition crammed within its pages, but it reads like a potboiler and the characters are somewhat slender.
For an actress such as Tautou, who has thrived in character-driven movies, Sophie must have been, well, boring? “Actually, I find Sophie’s character quite deep,” she counters. “And we really wanted to add that depth to Sophie in the character of the movie, which you don’t really have in the book. In the film there are real acting scenes. It still moves quickly but there is something human in the movie, too. Sophie is like me in that I am someone who is stubborn and does what she wants. Besides, I haven’t always played characters that are dreamers; that was just Amélie really. I’m quite down-to-earth and practical.”
This practical nature means that she dismisses any notion of truth in the story, which is adapted from the novel by the screenwriter of A Beautiful Mind, Akiva Goldsmith, and she has little interest in the unsuccessful court case brought by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who claimed that Brown had plagiarised their 1982 bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
“The controversy, any of it, doesn’t worry me,” Tautou says. “There have been hundreds of books written on this subject and this is just fiction; it’s not a true story or a documentary. It’s also not a religious movie. I was brought up going to church, although I’m not officially a Catholic, and I do believe in God, well, my God.
“But everyone should be aware that this is just a thriller. The movie is very faithful to the book; I hope it is a great mystery and,” she pauses, her eyes passing once more over Mona Lisa’s serene countenance, “maybe a little magical.”
The Da Vinci Code opens on May 19
