“The Blood Countess”, interview with actress Isabelle Huppert

Presented in Berlinale Special Gala at the 76th Berlinale, The Blood Countess is the new film by German filmmaker and visual artist Ulrike Ottinger, who reinterprets the vampire myth as a sumptuous adventure tale with black humour. Isabelle Huppert plays the “Blood Countess”, a vampire for the first time in her career, hoping she will get to “bite more humans” in her future projects.   

Following Ulrike’s craziness

For Isabelle Huppert, two months on set with Ulrike Ottinger was an experience unlike any other. “She’s a quite interesting person, very interesting to follow in her craziness, her dreams and her visions.” The construction of the character was defined from the very beginning by Ottinger’s work on costume, hair and makeup, which Huppert embraced fully. “I agreed with her vision and I knew that was really part of the construction of the character.” “The locations were like a secret language between all the actors,” she adds, “and the way she was filming them.”

A countess from another time

The Blood Countess is a figure of another era, a noble woman from centuries past, displaced in the present, never quite rooted, always on the verge of leaving again. Huppert found her way into the character through pure intuition: the way she moves, the way she speaks, the particular quality of someone who carries the weight of history but inhabits the world lightly. “She’s not really rooted, she travels and she’s subject to leave again,” Huppert reflects. “All of this was never really conscious. It’s not that Ulrike and I sat down and decided. But at some point it necessarily infuses your construction of the character.”

A quest for something unnamed

What does the Blood Countess want? Isabelle Huppert resists easy answers. “She’s almost more like a messenger — she’s seeking for something,” she says. “Something that’s not really named in the film. A source of life. And by seeking something like this, she’s attracted to death at the same time.” It is this combination of the opposite sides of human experience, good and evil, life and death, the profound and the absurd, that draws Huppert to roles like this one. “It’s never one dimension of being evil or good. It’s always more mingled and questioning.”

Funny, not psychological

Isabelle Huppert pushes back gently on the idea that this role was unusual for her because it demanded silence rather than psychology. “I speak all the time in the movie,” she laughs. And as for psychological roles — “I never really understood what it meant, because everybody has a psyche by definition.” What she found most attractive about working with Ottinger was precisely the lightness of it all. “She has this ability of being quite profound — you can imagine that it doesn’t come from nowhere — but it’s still a bit mysterious where it exactly comes from. And it’s very funny and very light.”

Plot