I c ontacted the director, Michael Haneke, asking to work with him, and the result was Code Unknown (Code Inconnu). I play an actress, one of several Paris residents from different cultures and countries - Africa, Romania, the French countryside - whose lives inter-relate.
The point was to ask questions about how we behave towards others, and how judgmental we can be when we don't know a person's history. In some scenes I was completely free to do whatever I felt, while others were precisely planned. That's always the dilemma for an actress, because you have both to control and to let things happen.
I'd love to work with Michael again - he's a real director and I share his concern about violence and what's happening in the world. His 1997 film, Funny Games, was controversial in France because of its violence, but I understand why he made it the way he did. He showed that it's easy to be manipulative in a movie. A movie can be a gun, powerful and dangerous, and you have to be aware of how you're using it.
My aim is not to make as many films as possible - because time is precious - but to choose what I get involved with. I try not to calculate too much, but just to go with what my heart says.
This is not the first time I've suggested a collaboration with a director. I wrote to Andrei Konchalowski when he was staging The Seagull in Paris, and I told the Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami I would like to work with him too. Approaching a director is so natural: after all, they come to actors and it should be a mutual process. Even in a love relationship, you don't know which person originally chose the other.
