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Nathalie Baye: a woman in full She does sexy, but not pornographic: the great French actress talks to Matthew Sweet 11 June 2000
Nathalie Baye is one of those French actresses who looks as if she spent three years at the Sorbonne studying how to sit on a chair: vertebrae neatly stacked, shoulders back, left leg lowered gently across right leg, left hand unfurled to pour the slouchy journalist a glass of Evian. She's also got that indefinable sartorial knack. Girls at my school who wore black-and- white snakeskin-print blouses, knee boots and pencil skirts were generally said to do anything for a polystyrene tray of chips and gravy. And though this doesn't feature on the room service menu of her chi-chi hotel, I'm sure it's not the case with Nathalie Baye. Mention Baye's name to a Parisian taxi driver, and he might just take you to your destination by the least circuitous route. She's not a household name over here, but in France, she's adored and for a number of reasons. Her long collaboration with François Truffaut, for one: The Man Who Loved Women (1977); The Green Room (1978); in Day for Night (1973) she was the spunky assistant who delivered the film's defiant statement of the sacred primacy of cinema: "I might leave a man for a movie, but I'd never leave a movie for a man!" She posed for the covers of Playboy and Paris Match. She romanced Johnny Hallyday (the Gallic answer to Elvis, now a rather tumbledown figure) and had a child with him but the paparazzi always caught her smiling. At 51, she can look back on a career that includes larky horror flicks as well as auteurial exercises with Godard and Tavernier. She's not shy, this Nathalie Baye. Which is fortunate, really, considering the nature of her latest film, Une Liaison Pornographique. "The title is dangerous," she asserts. "When I first got the script I thought they must be crazy. I'm not the kind of actress who makes pornographic films ..." But after an hour poring over the scenario by a young Belgian director, Frederic Fonteyne Baye was convinced. The film describes an affair between two characters who are never named, and who take great pains to remain anonymous to each other. Baye's character places an ad in a contact magazine, and a young man (played by Sergi Lopez) replies. They meet in a Parisian café. They adjourn for sex in a modest hotel. They discuss their fears, their hopes and their body hair. They fall in love. Then, a crisis occurs that requires them to choose whether to reveal the details of their lives to each other, or just disappear into the afternoon ... Baye likes her research. When she was on the Cannes jury in 1996, she was instrumental in the decision to award the Palme d'Or to Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies. The absence of concrete character detail in Fonteyne's script gave her a moment of panic. "I was in the car on my way to Luxembourg, where we shot the interior scenes, and suddenly I was terrified. I realised that I didn't know anything about this woman. I didn't know her name, if she was married, if she'd ever been in love, if she had children. When I was a young actress at theatre school, I needed to have a lot of information. You arrive on the set with two suitcases of ideas." Once that problem had been negotiated, Baye's biggest difficulty was trying not to get the giggles in the film's sex scenes. "I'm not as bad as I used to be," she reflects. "My first play on stage was with Gerard Depardieu. It wasn't a very good play, but it starred Bernard Blier a very famous French actor who died a few years ago, and very mean. I was just out of theatre school, and in my scenes with Gerard I had some terrible giggles. I just couldn't stop. Every day at five o'clock, just before I set out to go to the theatre, I was physically sick. Because if I had laughed it would all be finished for me. Bernard would have thrown me out and the play was very important for me because I needed to work, I had no money." The relationship with Depardieu has stayed firm ever since. She's quite happy to have daft films on her cv as well as the high-minded variety. "I don't want to know exactly how I'm considered because I'd go a bit mad. But I am not a serious actress. I don't like intellectual films." (Vertebrae unrolled, left leg removed gently from right leg, right hand extended to shake slouchy journalist's right hand, door quietly opened to send him on his way.) "Sometimes I tell Godard: 'You know, I don't understand a word of some of your films. But sometimes I am moved.' Not by all of them some of them are so boring." She really said that to Godard? "Oh yes ..." It's a wonder he didn't kick her in the shins. But then, she'd probably have kicked him back, even harder. From http://www.independent.co.uk/enjoyment/Film/Interviews/uneliason110600.shtml.
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