Interview: Melanie Laurent, actress and singer

Published on Tuesday 6 July 2010 16:08

MÉLANIE Laurent can vividly recall the moment she found out Quentin Tarantino wanted her for his Second World War fable Inglourious Basterds.

• Melanie Laurent, who plays violinist Anne-Marie Jacquet in The Concert

She was preparing to direct an episode of X Femmes, a series of erotic short films for French television station Canal+ that examined sex from the female perspective. "When he called me to say 'It's you,' I was choosing bra and g-strings with my costume designer!" she laughs. "I was in the middle of the street in Paris, and I was just screaming and crying, and my costume designer just went out and gave me the bra!"

Before she was cast as Shosanna, the spirited heroine who kills Hitler, Laurent was already well known by French film-goers for roles in Days Of Glory and The Beat That My Heart Skipped, and had even won a Csar (the French Oscar equivalent) for Most Promising Newcomer in 2007 for Philippe Lioret's Don't Worry, I'm Fine.

Yet if a Tarantino film represented a major step towards an international career, Laurent was more worried about completing her short film, requesting that her impending trip to Los Angeles for rehearsals be cut short. "My agent - she was like, 'Are you sure you want me to ask that?' And I said, 'Yes - I've had 35 people working for me for the last two weeks.'"

It's this sort of defiant attitude that rather typifies the petite, blonde Laurent. When she arrives to promote her latest film, The Concert, slumping into a plush red sofa in a suite in Paris's Grand Hotel, she immediately lights up a cigarette. "I'm French," she says, with an unapologetic shrug.

"I'm a smoker." Later she tells me that for Beginnings, a forthcoming drama in which she stars with Ewan McGregor, when director Mike Mills asked her to put herself on tape, she mailed him back saying, "Do I really have to do that? I have no time, I'm working so much in Paris." In the end she acquiesced, but rather than simply record her lines, she made a mini-movie, featuring music, effects and even a talking dog.

If Laurent, 27, boasts a rebellious streak, she's also highly self-critical. "I make movies because I feel the part," she says. "If I don't feel the part, if I don't understand my character, if I don't like all the story around my character, I won't make that movie. I don't take a lot of risk actually. For now, I just choose characters I love. I never play someone I hate or I don't understand. I just want to be close to my character." What's more, she admits it's been "a little bit easy" to be an actress since making Inglourious Basterds, because she's been sent all the best scripts. The result was a recent sojourn to the Paris stage to perform in the play Promenade De Sant.

A further risk comes from the fact that Laurent is currently putting the finishing touches to her debut album, on which she has collaborated with Irish singer-songwriter Damien Rice (rumour has it they're also dating, though at one point she tells me "I have no boyfriend"). Laurent, who confesses she's no singer compared with Rice, admits it's a big challenge.

For starters, she hadn't played the piano in ten years. "Damien just put me in front of a piano and said, 'You want to make an album? You want to be a musician? Be a musician.' So he just helped me to be inspired and not be the little French actress who wants to make an album just to make an album."

What with acting, singing and directing, it's little wonder the Paris-born Laurent stems from a family already highly embedded in the arts. Her maternal grandparents edited film posters and books. Her mother is a ballet dancer-cum-teacher while her father dubs various characters in The Simpsons into French.

"It's funny, every time I watch TV I can hear my father!" she laughs. Importantly, she also has Jewish heritage - her grandfather survived deportation by the Nazis - which makes her role in Tarantino's film all the more poignant. "My grandfather asked me to make the Tarantino movie to kill Hitler! I said, 'Grandpa, it's not up to me!' And he was like, 'Yeah, but he has to choose you, so you can kill Hitler!'"

The Concert also has a strong Jewish theme. Its central character, Andrei Filipov, is a former conductor of the Bolshoi orchestra who, three decades earlier in the Brezhnev era, had been demoted to stage caretaker after using too many Jewish musicians. The story itself is pure farce - as he swipes an invite asking the current orchestra to play in Paris and reassembles his old chums to play there. Laurent plays Anne-Marie Jacquet, a young violinist who joins them; she had to take a crash course in "the most difficult instrument ever", as she dubs it. "I know how to play air violin of Tchaikovsky, which is very important in life. You can use that every day!"

Given her roots, I wonder how her grandfather reacted to this tale. "He doesn't like everything in it! It's complicated for him to accept everything in that movie." Heaven knows what he'll make of her next film The Round-Up, which deals with the Second World War deportation of Jewish children from Paris to Germany.

Does she find it strange that she's been cast in a trio of Jewish roles? "It's a coincidence," she shrugs, toying with her yellow lighter, "that suddenly I received these amazing parts and every one was Jewish. But I asked myself, 'Is it a good idea? Or is it too much?' But the most important thing is to make a beautiful movie."

With The Concert already a massive hit in France, Laurent looks set to become one of her country's leading lights over the next few years.

But who does she admire? "I'm pretty impressed by the careers of (Catherine] Deneuve, (Isabelle] Adjani, (Emmanuelle] Bart and (Sophie] Marceau," she says. "They started at the same age as me, and they're still here. And they're beautiful, talented, strong and mysterious actresses. The new generation, we are not mysterious. Now everybody takes pictures of you drunk or with your new boyfriend." Somehow, you suspect Laurent isn't too savvy to get caught out like that.

The Concert is released on 16 July.

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, July 11, 2010

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