Isabelle Huppert quotes

Isabelle Huppert is a celebrated French actress known for her intense and versatile performances in both film and theatre. Renowned for choosing challenging and complex roles, she has worked with many acclaimed directors. She remains one of the most respected and awarded actresses in contemporary cinema. Here are 27 of her quotes:

I never wondered whether I should be a stage actress or a movie actress.

Isabelle Huppert

Perhaps Europeans are a bit more skeptic whereas Americans are more believers.

Isabelle Huppert

For an actress there is no greater gift than having a camera in front of you, listening to the most beautiful music in the world and just being looked at!

Isabelle Huppert

Acting is a way of living out one's insanity.

Isabelle Huppert

I like to take these unusual characters and then make them as normal as possible, because we all know that the tragedy and the abnormal always hides itself behind the normal.

Isabelle Huppert

For a long time I have compared cinema to music, I think cinema has a lot to do with the rhythm of music.

Isabelle Huppert

But it wasn't just a technical approach towards the piano, studying the music for this film was also a way of approaching the soul of the film, because the film is really about the soul of Schubert and the soul of Bach.

Isabelle Huppert

It really helps you to go through difficult situations by just thinking about it as being a big amount of work which you have to solve how to do. For example, I don't feel very inspired when I act, I just act. That's it.

Isabelle Huppert

For me, making films is like being on vacation, it's a nice walk. But theatre is like mountaineering. You never know whether you're going to fall off or make it to the top.

Isabelle Huppert

But someone like Claude Chabrol tries to make a connection between the society in which we live and the social reasons which make monsters out of some people.

Isabelle Huppert

Firstly I did it in this huge theatre in Avignon, then to smaller places, then bigger places. You have to change the volume of the voice, give more or less. The way you have to relate to space makes it like sculpture.

Isabelle Huppert

I don't know if you ever say to yourself that you want to be an actress. It eventually becomes a social function - you are an actress and you make a living out of it, but at the beginning it's more a matter of how to survive, or how to exist in a certain way.

Isabelle Huppert

But theatre is always a difficult experience.

Isabelle Huppert

Going through this musical experience really helped us to understand the core of the film.

Isabelle Huppert

When you come to do the film, it is not the time to wonder why you do it. It's just how to do it.

Isabelle Huppert

In a very complex way, things have improved in the dramatic field. Before you had the good and the bad and you couldn't mingle them. Now it's more ambiguous.

Isabelle Huppert

I did a film very quickly, and then a lot of work for television, and then I did stage work.

Isabelle Huppert

Before I do a play I say that I hope it's going to be for as short a time as possible but, once you do it, it is a paradoxical pleasure. One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again. It's like a drug.

Isabelle Huppert

My mom's a Catholic, and my dad's a Jew, and they didn't want anything to do with anything.

Isabelle Huppert

Once you have made the decision to do the film, once you have identified the desire and all the deep and personal, intimate, artistic reasons why you want to do the film, then it's more a matter of how to do things.

Isabelle Huppert

I think being an actress is more how to cope with the fact that you can't do anything else than to express a talent. It's a way of being untalented for anything.

Isabelle Huppert

If I seem detached or distant, it's because I think this is a more exact reproduction of life, where you hide as much as you show. When I see a scene in which feelings get loudly exteriorized, I say to myself, 'Well, at least this never happens to me.' I very rarely go through this type of expression. Most of the time things are hidden or at least much more subdued.

Isabelle Huppert