Biography

May 18, 1956 · Dreux, Eure-et-Loir, France

Member of the jury at the Brest European Short Film Festival, in 2003

Has supported Ségolène Royal's 2007 presidential campaign.

She studied for 3 years at the CNSAD (National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts). Her acting teachers include Michel Bouquet and Antoine Vitez.

[press conference for The Divide (2021) at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival] I was looking for a topic that would talk about my own questions about society which I view as increasingly harsh and effectively fractured. I wanted to talk about the world today - my position. When I was 18 years old, I was very engaged, I was quite an activist, I thought the world would become better, there would be more solidarity - I was a young girl full of dreams - and I thought to myself today, "What kind of horrible, dreadful world are we leaving to the up-and-coming generation and our children?!" I felt it was necessary to talk about this world and the way I view it. The way I view the world is that of someone who's a very privileged person and I wanted to talk about the world in a very straight way. But at the same time I wanted things to be fairly humorous, I didn't want to produce a really heavy film saying, "this is right, this is not good"......thanks to the characters, you can see that everyone comes together.

[press conference for Homecoming (2023) at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival] I began to write the film with my co-screenwriter who's not here unfortunately - because she's also a DJ - Naïla Guiguet, a young screenwriter who's just graduated from La Fémis. I wanted to talk about young people so I thought maybe I was too old to do this and I needed some fresh blood, someone younger. I was asking myself all sorts of questions. Elisabeth [Elisabeth Perez], who's my producer and also the person I live with, has a son who's 20 years old now - I saw him grow up - and I was very keen to listen to how this young man had questions to ask about society, so I thought I would like to talk about youth in another film. I felt it was an unknown world for me because a lot of things had happened since my generation grew up. I also deeply wanted to film Corsica and to film in Corsica because for me it's a missing part. My father was Corsican; I wasn't raised in Corsica because my mother practically removed me from the island. I went there in the summer but things were too painful, there were too many memories.

[Cannes press conference for Homecoming (2023)] I would perhaps ask myself more questions. If we had intimacy coaches to work with the actresses to make them feel more comfortable in their bodies.....we did a lot of preparation for the scenes in any event. Maybe today I now realise these are very important issues and I would use an intimacy coach now. Maybe I was a bit pretentious in thinking that I had 30/35 years' experience and that I had more experience than an intimacy coach because I had already directed intimate scenes in my films. I would now take more pains to make the actresses more at ease. I've made a lot of films; sometimes you don't think enough about such issues.