This job makes you mad - French actress

One of France`s most promising actors, Lou Doillon, has cinema in her blood and often picks up roles that scare the living daylights out of her, enjoying life in the fast lane.

´"I find that there`s nothing more worrying then when you`re safe, in general, in whatever life. When you`re safe with your husband, you should be careful, when you`re safe with anyone, something is wrong. We are never ever safe," the young actress says.

"I always wonder about horror movies, because I`ve already done a few, and I always thought, we`re very strange animals - we actually pay to go and be scared for two hours! I don`t think a dog or any other animal would do that. There`s a lot of adrenaline that has to do with it," she says.

Whether she appears in a horror movie or a family drama, the challenge is to keep moving on. "Sometimes I feel super guilty: I read three books a week and I go to ten concerts. Do I go ten times to the cinema during a week? No, I don`t. I like things that make me active. Sadly, the majority of films want you to be passive. When I listen to music I`m active, when I`m reading a book also, because it has to do with my own imagination."

In fact, cinema has never been the be-all and end-all for Jane Birkin`s daughter, who says she can`t relate to a bulk of actors, who claim, "I`d kill to do that role!"

"I like life much more than I like movies. I love making movies, but I won`t die if I don`t act anymore, I`ll find something else to do. I don`t have this ambition and maybe that`s why sometimes I get scared of Hollywood. The only thing that`s scary is the ambition. Sometimes you read biographies by actors and you think, was it worth it? It`s my joke with my sister Charlotte [Gainsbourg] - I always ask, `Find me one happy actress who`s got a wonderful career. One.` You never can find. They all went mad, they didn`t have children, they ended up committing suicide, they were depressive, they were beating up their children if they had any?This job makes you mad!" Doillon says.

She says, the danger all actors are fully aware of, is the ability to leave the character on the set. "Never bring him home," warns the actress.

"That`s why we have method. I don`t think a good actor depends on method. I think it`s bullshit. Method is just there to reassure you and the others. I don`t think you can go to a school that will teach you how to be a good actor. You can go to a school that can teach you how not to go mad, how to pretend when you can`t find the reality, especially when you do theater, because you can`t have magicality [sic] and grace every night, and you need technique to protect yourself."

As for her personally, she says she prefers a "very weird method of acting" which she learnt firsthand from her father, French director Jacques Doillon.

"He thinks that to be a good actor you have to take away layers, like an onion, to reach to the complete purity. Americans work the opposite - they add layers. I like my dad`s vision of it, because it`s more dangerous to take away. I think anyone in the street, if you teach them well, can pretend an accent. However, you can`t find anyone in the street who`s ready to be absolutely naked in front of everyone. That`s what`s beautiful about our jobs - it`s giving everything to be judged. That`s why actors are very brave, it`s the only reason why we get paid that much. I think, it`s because of the sacrifice of putting yourself in the position to be judged by everyone. There`s very few people who can actually deal with being judged all day long."

Another challenge of course is dealing with rejection.

"I do 50 castings a week to have 49 `No`s`. I have to go ten times a day to find a job. It`s a very stressing, weird job because you are never sure of anything. You never know if you`re getting better or not. The only thing we have is experience and the experience is to be careful of your roles, not to be eaten up by them. You always do roles that will resemble you in one way or another. I don`t think I can cancel myself to a 100 per cent and become someone else. I think it was Brecht who used to say that, whatever it is, you`re 80 per cent yourself."

One of the latest and most-stylish films she has made so far, Gogola, is set in `60s Paris and sees Doillon playing a female gigolo. The film based on the true story of writer-turned-director Laure Charpentier.

"Contrary to a lot of people who keep on telling me that it`s a lesbian movie, I don`t find it so. It`s a very hard movie on someone who`s extremely lonely; who cannot love men, but cannot love women either and who, at the end of the day, just hates herself," she says.

Getting under the skin of her characters, surreal and real, is nothing new to Doillon. In 2007 she starred in a family drama, Boxes, directed by her famous mother, the versatile singer and actress, who was once the muse of Serge Gainsbourg, Jane Birkin.

She recalls that being part of the film was a "very strange experience, like live psychoanalysis." Describing her mother as a "super-sentimental woman," she says it is her father however, with whom Lou has already worked twice, who is a "super-hard man."

"You`re like Joan of Arc - you either survive or die. He`s not gonna help you out, he will make you do 120 takes until you wanna kill him!"

But perhaps no other director could compete with the bad boy of Hollywood, Abel Ferrara, the director of Go Go Tales, in which Doillon played several years ago.

"It was hell! Yes, it was a great deception. I arrived on what Americans call `independent movie` which is in fact $9 million. You arrive in Cinecitta studios with load of actors who are not particularly nice and Abel is drunk and on heroin and is beating up his girlfriend who`s 20 years old. And everyone thinks it`s cool! After 10 days I thought, f*** that, I`m leaving! I ran away from the film. I was very scared because Abel said he was gonna kill me, I had to hide in the hotel," recalls Doillon.

The actress with a sharp sense of self-esteem reckoned she would not put up with a "complete dictator." Not for the world.

"I decided it wasn`t worth it, because the real reality was to think, What Am I? Am I an actress? And I thought, `No. Number one, I`m a human being. Number two, I`m a woman. And number three, I`m an actress. And it`s not because I`m an actress that I will let you be such a monster.` It`s royalism. I was reading a biography on Elizabeth I, and I told Abel, you`re a royalist, you`re like Elizabeth I," she says.

Doillon maintains, "You always want to be what you`re not." If that is true, what was the challenge when she agreed to strip for Playboy magazine some time ago?

"I never thought I was sexual. So I wanted to be the calendar girl in the trucks. There was something in my mind where I thought, `You`ve made it if you are at the back of the truck.?"

Touché!

´Valeria Paikova, RT

sections: Culture