Her new film is directed with cool precision by Claude Chabrol, but I'm expecting a bright and breezy encounter with Ludivine Sagnier. If my forecast – based on her mischievous turns as a pyjama-clad sleuth in 8 Women and a twinkly Tinkerbell in Peter Pan – is a little off the mark, perhaps a lost passport is to blame. She was up early in Paris this morning, rushing around for a last-minute replacement before boarding the Eurostar for London. Sipping tea in the corner of a Piccadilly hotel bar towards the end of a busy day, she is wearing a shimmering, silvery dress but looks a little overcast.
There's an excuse for all this meteorological business: Sagnier, 29, whose first name means "divine light", stars in The Girl Cut in Two as a weathergirl, Gabrielle Deneige, at a Lyon TV station. Gabrielle's chance encounter with a seasoned author, played with quiet control by François Berléand, leads to an affair, irritating one of Gabrielle's admirers and igniting a crime of passion. It's a study of innocence and experience, purity and perversion – bringing to mind Sagnier's first standout film, François Ozon's Water Drops on Burning Rocks, a kinky merry-go-round in which her thick-fringed, doe-eyed naïf was seduced by her boyfriend's older male lover.
"They are both innocent creatures who end up being totally devious," she says of the two roles, adding: "I've had a lot of movies involving a relationship with an older man. In real life, it never happened. I don't know why directors see that in me." While she spent most of Water Drops in or out of her underwear, The Girl Cut in Two takes what Chabrol has called a "chaste" approach to Gabrielle's sexual apprenticeship. When I watched the film a second time, it wasn't nearly as explicit as I had remembered. "I like the fact that it's only suggested," says Sagnier. "It's the audience who determines its own level of perversity." She draws a parallel with Molière's play, The School of Women: "It's the story of a rich lord who raises a young innocent girl and destines her to be his wife, and then she starts to rebel. When Molière did the play, French society was scandalised, saying how perverted it was. Then he wrote another play, called The Criticism of The School of Women, about the reactions. He said the perversity is not in my play – it's in your eyes. Chabrol has the same mockery."
The film is based on a real scandal, dating from the early 20th century, involving the New York architect Stanford White. Did she do any research? "I learned about the story only as the shoot was ending – and I resented Chabrol for that," she says, voice escalating. I said, 'Why didn't you tell me?' And he said, 'You didn't need to know.' He just wanted me to play instinctively." What did she make of the prolific auteur, who turns 80 next year? "He doesn't doubt. Never doubts," she enthuses. How does he compare as a director to François Ozon, her partner-in-crime on three films, whose Swimming Pool won comparisons to Chabrol? "Ozon is still young. He tries things, he makes mistakes, he puts himself in danger much more than Chabrol. Maybe it's a question of age. When I was shooting with Chabrol, Ozon would call me every two days to ask me what he was like, whether he does a lot of takes. He wanted to know everything! I was showing off, saying, 'It's a secret, I can't tell you.'" Her eyes light up with glee. "I was enticing him."
Ozon and Sagnier share this sort of relationship. When they make films, "we're like children playing with dolls," she explains. The director gave the ingénue a showcase role in his musical whodunit 8 Women, casting her alongside a stellar shortlist of France's grandest dames: Deneuve, Huppert, Ardant, Béart. The film was an impossibly glamorous game of Cluedo, with each of the femmes implicated in the murder of the man of the house (in the bedroom, with the knife). Ozon gave each of his leading ladies a signature tune in the film and introduced them with symbolic flowers in a stylish title sequence. Sagnier's seniors were given smoky ballads and torch songs, characterised by velvety roses and exotic orchids; Ludivine sang effervescent French pop and was credited with a daisy beside her name. Her joie de vivre swept 8 Women along, but Sagnier almost missed out on all the fun.
"He wrote it for me, but I disappointed him," she explains. "I read the script even before the producers. Then Ozon started to gather all of the stars and he said, 'You know, as I'm hiring all of these stars we're going to have to audition you because I'm not sure if you can handle it.' I was like, 'Come on! You know I can do it!' He said I had to audition. So I went there with a friend of mine – Gerard Depardieu's daughter." She breaks off for a deadpan thumbnail sketch – "she looks like Depardieu, but with a dress" – then rattles on with the story: "As she was my friend, we were so happy to play together that I overdid it a lot. After the audition, Ozon said he couldn't hire me and he dumped me like that! He hired another actress. I was heartbroken." When her replacement fell pregnant before the shoot, Ozon was on the phone with one week's notice: "We need you!" With Ozon, says Sagnier, it's always a bit like that Serge Gainsbourg-Jane Birkin song: "Je t'aime, moi non plus."
Her performance in 8 Women was rewarded with the Silver Bear at Berlin, shared with the rest of the cast. Then came a killer role in Ozon's psychological thriller Swimming Pool. In a way, it's a reflection of The Girl Cut in Two: Sagnier's character similarly encounters an older author, except this time she plays the seducer, bewitching a spinsterish British crime writer (Charlotte Rampling) with her sexual abandon. The film's international success gave Sagnier a breakthrough of sorts, but she was frustrated by the scripts that came her way. Hollywood, its eyes popping at her sun-kissed body in Swimming Pool, made her an abundance of offers she could easily refuse. "The roles were shit," she blurts out, then apologises with a guilty smile. "It was girls on the beach – especially in America. I wasn't interested in that, so I kept focused on challenging myself." Was she disheartened? "I felt impatient. I had to deal with a sudden sex-symbol image. At the beginning it was crazy. Then I understood that I had to accept it, and I dealt with it. I'm a very balanced person. I didn't want to lose the balance. I wasn't ready to go to America, where the competition is very aggressive."
At Cannes, Swimming Pool was screened alongside La Petite Lili – Claude Miller's updated take on The Seagull, in which Sagnier played the role equivalent to Chekhov's aspiring actress, Nina. The film wasn't seen much in the UK, and neither was La Californie, an adaptation of a Georges Simenon mystery. Instead, we got her silent clowning as Tink in Peter Pan; a segment shared with Nick Nolte in the portmanteau film Paris Je T'Aime; and little more than a cameo as a callous, much sought-after marquise in Molière (summarised by Sagnier as three days' work and the opportunity to wear beautiful dresses). There was also Un Secret, a second-world-war drama about occupied France, and Christophe Honoré's Umbrellas of Cherbourg-like Les Chansons d'Amour, which had Sagnier bursting into song once more – and caught up in another love triangle, this time with Louis Garrel and Chiara Mastroianni – only for her character to drop dead after half an hour.
Several of the films were made in close succession; The Girl Cut in Two, which was released in France back in the summer of 2007, dates from this whirlwind period. By then, Sagnier was ready to take time out and enjoy parenthood; she now has two daughters, the youngest born in January this year.
It's 20 years since Sagnier's first roles as a child actor opposite Gerard Depardieu in Je Veux Rentrer à la Maison and Cyrano de Bergerac. What are her memories of starting out? "I was a very little girl. I remember the big voice of Depardieu," she smiles, "and I remember feeling confident. Intimidated but confident." I ask about her favourite directors and she sighs a little before unreeling the usual suspects: Truffaut, Hitchcock, Bergman, Godard, Fellini. It turns out she asked Chabrol the same thing: "He said, 'You know, little girl, that question is not interesting.' I said why? 'It's not about the directors that I like. It's about the directors I dislike – then you know more about me.'"
OK, so which directors doesn't Sagnier like? Pause. "I prefer not to quote them," she laughs. Maybe there's a type of film you dislike? "I really have problems with horror movies. I don't watch them. It's a feeling I don't want to have in cinema. I'm too reactive. It's too draining to watch that kind of movie." She has said before that she is easily overwhelmed by her characters. Take The Girl Cut in Two, which ends with the title's magic act: "The last scene helped me get over it because to me it's like a rebirth as Gabrielle gets cut in two – an exorcism of her past suffering. That's why she has these tears – it's a deliverance, a relief."
And for her next trick? Sagnier will appear alongside Vincent Cassel in a double bill also based on a true crime – several crimes, in fact, throughout the career of France's notorious bank-robber, Jacques Mesrine. She's also shooting a movie this summer with Kristin Scott Thomas – it's going to be scary one, she reckons, but not a horror film. Beyond that, who knows? She'll be searching for the right role. "Good characters are rare," she admits. "As long as I find one or two a year, I'm happy."