Isabelle Huppert has yet to be pushed aside by AI, the French star said at the Busan International Film Festival, though she has heard she may soon be speaking Korean and Japanese.
“I didn’t know I spoke Korean. I just know how to say ‘annyeonghaseyo’ [hello],” Huppert said at a press conference for Marc Fitoussi’s comedy “All About Corinne,” which is screening in the festival’s Gala Presentation section.
“It really is me acting. So I haven’t yet been threatened, confronted with that admittedly grim prospect,” Huppert said when asked whether AI is wiping out acting jobs. “So far I’ve seen that it’s still my face on screen, and I hope that continues,” she added.
Huppert allowed that AI is a threat in theory, but compared it to fears that cinemas would disappear or that records would die out, only for vinyl to make a comeback. “Maybe I’m wrong to be optimistic, I don’t know,” she said.
Huppert also confirmed she will appear in a film by Dario Argento. “I’m very happy about it. I think it will be some time next year,” she said.
Fitoussi, for whom “All About Corinne” marks a fourth collaboration with Huppert, said he is in the early stages of a new project and would like to work with her again.
“It’s a bit too early to talk about it, but in any case I saw a film with Joan Crawford that really excites me, and imagining a remake with Isabelle tempts me quite a lot,” Fitoussi said.
“I hope so,” Huppert replied.
“All About Corinne,” which premiered in Locarno, stars Huppert as Corinne Maclou, a veteran extra who has never let go of her dream of acting, and follows her friendship with another actor. Sandrine Kiberlain and other well-known performers appear as themselves. The film will open in South Korea next spring.
Asked how she approached playing an extra, Huppert said the strength of Fitoussi’s screenplay and dialogue did much of the work, and that while being an extra isn’t a job like any other, it is still a job. “I play an extra, but I could just as well play any other profession. So for me it didn’t present any particular difficulty,” she said.
Huppert pushed back on the idea that the film looks at the acting profession only with warmth, noting it carries a certain cruelty in many situations. She said she sees the film industry in the story as one example of a deeply hierarchical society. “Obviously that applies to any similar organization where there are those who have power and those who don’t. It isn’t necessarily about demonizing the world of cinema either,” she said.
Fitoussi said the project began almost as a joke, with the idea of casting one of France’s busiest actors as someone who never gets to act. He called Huppert before writing a word. “It’s because she said yes that I started writing,” he said. He also contacted Kiberlain and the other actors playing themselves before he began the script.
The director first explored the world of extras in a 2008 documentary, “Des Figurants,” and borrowed from one of its subjects, a woman who wore a pink scarf in the hope of catching a director’s eye. In the new film, Corinne’s odd tuft of hair serves the same purpose. “In any case, these are characters I inevitably find very moving, because they’re a bit like losers, a bit invisible. And it was nice to make them heroic for the length of a film,” Fitoussi said.
He also revealed that he had started writing a film in which Huppert would play a truck driver, but stopped after learning that Juliette Binoche had shot an American film in a similar role. He said he will likely return to that script one day.
Huppert arrived in Busan the morning of the press conference after performing a reading of a novel by Nobel laureate Han Kang in Seoul with Lee Hye-young, her co-star in Hong Sang-soo’s “A Traveler’s Needs.” The pair first staged it at the Avignon Festival, where Korea was the guest country this year. It was her second stage appearance in Seoul, following Robert Wilson’s “Mary Said What She Said.”
This is Huppert’s third visit to Busan and Fitoussi’s first trip to Korea. Huppert, who has appeared in three Hong films, was elected this year as the first female president of the Cinémathèque Française.