All DRESSED UP and ready for the UK premiere of her film
Swimming Pool at the Edinburgh Film Festival, the actress Ludivine Sagnier looks every inch the French screen siren. She’s wearing a pink mini-skirt and pink high-heeled shoes; she’s also carrying a small pink handbag and sporting pink toenails. It’s a stylish ensemble. She’s chatty and lively too; straight away, she’s off talking about the killer heatwave in France and the holiday she took in Brittany. She talks quickly, sometimes more quickly than she can think, occasionally flicking her hair back dramatically and grasping for the right word in English. “I felt like a how do you say? — Muppet!” she says at one point about her relationship with the director François Ozon on
Swimming Pool.
“You mean puppet?” I ask.
“Yes, puppet! Sorry!” she laughs, taking a deep drag on her cigarette. If she’s not smoking a cigarette, she’s waving one around unlit.
It’s Sunday afternoon, and we’re sitting together in an Edinburgh hotel bar. On the table in front of us sits a pile of postcards bearing a photo of Sagnier lying in the sun next to a glimmering pool, wearing nothing but a skimpy bikini. It’s the picture from the Swimming Pool poster, which graced countless buses and hoardings during the film’s world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May and which now does the same in Britain. Does Sagnier not find it a bit strange? Does it not make her uncomfortable that a near naked photo of her lies there between us, next to an ashtray and a bottle of water?
Sagnier brushes off the idea. “I know this picture quite well, so I don’t really care about it any more. I care about my actual weight though. I went on a very restricted diet in preparation for that film and I became almost a stick. The diet was unbearable.”
Sagnier doesn’t look like someone who needs to worry about her weight. When making Swimming Pool last summer though, Sagnier’s body was key to her depiction of Julie, her boisterous and seductive character. Julie spends much of her time half naked or rolling around with a series of men that she hauls back to her father’s southern French villa, which she is reluctantly sharing with the English crime writer Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling). The contrast between Sarah as a prudish and very English middle-aged woman and Julie as a carefree and confident Provençal beauty is central to the film.
But was Sagnier worried what people would think of the scenes of sex and nudity she was asked to play?
“When I shot it, I didn’t think about what people would think,” she reasons. “I thought nothing actually. I knew it was very erotic, but I had no idea what it was going to be like. Now, when I see the movie, I get very shy.”
Swimming Pool is the third time that Sagnier has worked with 35-year-old Ozon, the French director who spotted her in a short film, Acide Animé, in 2000 and asked her to audition for a role in his film Water Drops on Burning Rocks. Sagnier then worked with Ozon again alongside a cast including Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant as the mischievous tomboy Catherine in the well-received ensemble piece 8 Women, released last year.
Sagnier’s work with Ozon has seen her mature as an actress and her fame rocket in France and beyond. But she’s no novice; she embraced theatre classes and took the odd film and TV role from the age of ten. Also, from the age of 13 to 19, she maintained a lucrative little sideline too: dubbing American movies into French.
“I was 13, but I had the voice of a seven-year-old girl, which got me a lot of work.” (She tells me that the men, or at least the voices, who dub Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone are stars in their own right.) Although her dubbing days are officially over, she recently returned to dub herself in Swimming Pool. “François says I’m better in French than in English,” she laughs.
The money which Sagnier earned while ghosting for Holly wood gave her the freedom, when she was 17, to give up a brief spell on a university literature course in Paris, move to the centre of Paris from her family home in the suburbs and dabble in interesting, but badly paid, short film work — which is how Ozon came to discover her.
Talking of her on-set relationship with Ozon, Sagnier’s frankness betrays how close the two have become professionally. While most Hollywood actors will declare undying love for their co-stars and directors even if they secretly want to kill them, Sagnier — naturally — is much more French about the whole thing.
“The more I work with him, the more doubts I have,” Sagnier explains. “He is becoming more demanding of me too. That’s what makes me improve. We’re very close, so we quite easily get into conflict. It was quite tense on the set.
“He wouldn’t give me any details about his vision for the movie. I was completely excluded and felt completely lost. I was angry with him for that, because I didn’t really understand that by hiding information from me he was directing me. I only understood that later. I forgive him.”
This Christmas we will see Sagnier play Tinkerbell in Peter Pan in another big-budget cinematic take on J. M. Barrie’s story, directed by the Australian P. J. Hogan (Muriel’s Wedding). Sagnier was originally employed only for a couple of weeks as a model for a digital Tinkerbell. The director and producers liked her so much that they invited her back to play a real — but mute — version of the character.
“In some ways, it was harder for me to lose my inhibitions for Tinkerbell than it was to play Julie in Swimming Pool,” Sagnier says. “With Julie I just had to get naked and have sex. Full stop. In Peter Pan, it was a deeper exposure. I had to be a child again and forget everything I had learnt. That was a harder thing to do.”
One can only imagine most British actresses muttering and stumbling through a conversation about on-screen sex. Sagnier couldn’t care less what she talks about. She’s open and honest, jumping from anecdotes about the secret diary she kept on the set to how the more she talks about the film, the more she hates it — “I’m sick of it now. I’ve seen it maybe five or six times. I need six months’ rest before I can watch it again.”
All the time, she’s talking quickly, laughing excitedly. It’s no wonder that Hollywood is knocking at her door. She’s had several offers and is keen to take on some American or British roles soon, to build on her experience of acting in English. She’s in no rush, though.
“I’m wealthy enough to be able to make good choices. I’m very happy in Paris in my apartment,” she says. “I don’t need to have a villa in Beverly Hills. For the moment.”
