Ludivine Sagnier: 'I got frightened and shut down'

It is a chill December day when I meet Ludivine Sagnier at her local cafe, in a grungy neck of eastern Paris. No press minders or lavish hotel suite for Ms Sagnier. I'm sitting inside, fretting that I must have the wrong venue, when I spot her through the greasy window. She has her wool hat pulled low; she's sucking on a cigarette, stamping her feet to keep warm. She might be an office worker on lunch break or a student idling between lectures. Sometimes the lack of a statement can be the most eloquent statement of all.

Nearly a decade ago, Sagnier arrived at a crossroads. François Ozon's Swimming Pool cast her in an eye-catching role as artist's muse (sensual and untrustworthy, suntanned and naked). The film made a splash, and plumed into a major arthouse hit in the US. A Hollywood career was hers for the taking, but Sagnier was scared. She balked and bowed out. She stayed in France, and raised a family instead.

Inside the cafe, the actor provides a thumbnail sketch of the surrounding neighbourhood. She has lived here for years, she says. It's vibrant, bustling; a happy mix of retail outlets, artist studios and "electro music". The place keeps her grounded, though she concedes that OK, she's not the only actor on the block. "Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci live right over there."

In her latest film, Love Crime, Sagnier plays a corporate worm that turns. For the first half she's the supplicant, sweating through an agonising, quasi-sexual relationship with her implacable boss (Kristin Scott Thomas). For the second she's the agent of change, apparently martyring herself in the service of committing the perfect crime. "Human beings are so complicated," grumbles the detective called in to clean up the mess.

Sagnier explains that she actually shot Love Crime three years ago and that her memory of it is coloured by the subsequent death of its director, Alain Corneau. "I mean, I do like the movie," she stresses. "But for me it's tainted by frustration and so much pain, because he died on the very week it got released in France." Corneau, she now realises, was suffering from lung cancer while the picture was being shot. In hindsight this explains a lot.

"In France we have a saying: 'He never put his arms down.' Forward, forward, never stop, which was very difficult for me and Kristin. He was like a little boy playing with iron soldiers and we were the soldiers. He wouldn't talk, wouldn't listen, and we had to do exactly what he wanted. It was like he only had so much energy to spare. He must have known he did not have much time left."

The film, she adds, has just been remade by Brian De Palma, as Passion. She's eager to see it; she wants to know if the sexual undercurrent has been brought to the fore.

What if the new version is better than hers? Wouldn't that make her mad? She gives an airy shrug. "I would not be surprised."

Sagnier turned 33 last birthday and has been acting since infancy. By the time she hit her teens she had already performed alongside Gérard Depardieu in Cyrano de Bergerac and carved a niche as a coquettish mainstay of French TV. At 19 she stumbled into what would prove an electrifying collaboration with the talented Ozon. She was the playful, sexual catalyst in Water Drops on Burning Rocks and the mischievous tomboy, dancing jubilantly in her pyjamas, in the bracing 8 Women. Along the way she gave us a 21st-century riff on the French gamine: at once innocent and perverse, beautiful and bent out of shape. The press promptly touted her as "the new Bardot", although that barely scratches at the surface of her wonky appeal. On screen, Sagnier manages to be at once coolly carnal and haplessly gauche. For me, she's like Stan Laurel as played by Marilyn Monroe, though I'll concede that this description may well not catch on.

I tell her that her career seems to have gone ridiculously smoothly and she laughs in my face. "I'm glad you see it that way. I think it's a jungle, a constant fight to create a career that's cohesive and that means something. It requires a wisdom that I never used to have."

She talks about her moment of crisis, when Swimming Pool broke big. "Everything speeded up, all the studios wanted to see me. 'Oh, show me your teeth.' As if I were a horse, you know? And I got frightened and shut everything down. It made me feel out of control. It made me realise that I had some personal desires that were nothing to do with cinema, like building a family." She pulls a face. "People told me I was making the worst mistake of my life. For several years afterwards I worried that I had."

Where would she be if she had taken the other path? "Maybe I'd be a coke addict," she says cheerfully. "Living up in Beverly Hills."

She quotes a line of French philosophy: happiness settles in reality, she says. Or wait, maybe that's wrong; maybe it's happiness settles in truth. Either way, she loves that quote. "It means that if you are living in truth, not blinded by illusion, then you can find the way to be happy. And if you are living in a bubble, away from reality, then all that you can hope for is the illusion of happiness."

On balance she is glad she's not a member of "the $1m club", the actors who live in bubbles. "How can you play a real person when you're not leading a real life? It's difficult, no? I remember seeing Catherine Deneuve as a factory worker in Dancer in the Dark. It was a bit funny, it wasn't credible. Some actors can manage it. Marion Cotillard, for example. She lives in a bubble but she was still absolutely convincing playing a working-class woman in Rust and Bone. It didn't feel like she was faking it."

Sagnier shares her apartment with her husband, film-maker Kim Chapiron, and her two daughters, aged seven and three. Right now, her nights are spent acting at a local theatre ("two stops on the Metro; I can be there in seven minutes"), though she has a number of other features in the pipeline, chasing up her recent appearances in the likes of Mesrine, Un Secret and The Devil's Double. Next year she plans to make a movie with her husband. She admits that this may be perilous. "It's not always easy, that's for sure. It didn't work for Sam Mendes and Kate Winslet."

She feels she has yet to have a breakthrough film and that's something she would like to experience. I tell her that she has had one already, nine years ago, when her immediate response was to turn tail and run. "Yeah, yeah, but I was too young. I was the rabbit in the headlights, completely lost. So I had to protect myself. But now I'm 33, I'm a mother of two. I've done the work and I know myself. I can face anything," she says. "I'm strong."

Love Crime is out next Friday.