The durable Isabelle Huppert

MANILA, Philippines - When two-time Cannes Best Actress winner Isabelle Huppert came to the country last month to start filming Brillante Mendoza’s new film, she knew she was in for something unique. One of the finest and most enduring actresses in France, Isabelle considers her experience working with Brillante memorable and impressive.

“I expected it to be very special because seeing his movies and having met him a couple of times, I was expecting something unusual and different from anything that I did before. His way of doing movies is very, very special,” she says.

And that is certainly what she got over the course of her three-week collaboration with the Cannes Best Director winner, experiencing, among other things, shooting without a script and being thrown into a boat by unknown men to be taken deep into the jungle.

The pair had recently finished a three-week shoot for Prey, Mendoza’s latest film inspired by the Abu Sayyaf’s kidnapping at Dos Palmas.

As part of the Cannes jury that awarded Mendoza the Best Director plum, Huppert was already half-inclined to work with the acclaimed director. After Cannes, the two had met at a retrospective on Brillante’s work being held in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and Huppert had expressed her curiosity about Mendoza’s directorial style.

However, it would still take a few e-mail exchanges before Huppert would be convinced to play the part of a missionary abducted by the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group. At that early stage, however, Huppert wondered exactly how Mendoza would come up with a movie within the course of a three-week shoot.

“Before starting, I wondered how he was going to make a really thick script into something in just that short a time. Didier (Costet, Mendoza’s French producer), who’s used to Brillante’s way, told me that I would see,” she recalls.

She would indeed experience firsthand what it is like to work on a Brillante Mendoza set upon arriving here in the country to do the film. For one thing, the thick script bandied around over e-mail turned out to not be as critical as Huppert had thought.

“Brillante gave me a script but as everybody knows, he doesn’t work with the script,” she recalls with a laugh. “There was a script, but sometimes I wish I didn’t have a script at all.”

Huppert was also exposed to the unconventional way with which Mendoza prepared the film’s actors for the three-week long production. The “hostages” and the “Abu Sayyaf” were kept apart from each other before the start of filming, something which she says worked in their favor during filming.

“I think we were literally thrown in that place altogether without knowing each other. Usually, I don’t really believe in that, but in this it really worked! I found myself in this boat surrounded by these people that I had no idea whom I was with,” she says. “I didn’t know who were actors and who were non-actors. The feeling of threat was so heavy and thick so I think it was really unique in creating this kind of atmosphere.”

As unconventional as she found Mendoza’s techniques to be, Huppert says that it proved beneficial not just to the film, but to her own acting as well.

“Things went in such a way that you always reach a more dramatic end. Nothing was banal or weak. You get to the heart of something in every scene,” she explains. “It’s very difficult to get this in movies. Very good directors make in each scene something essential, and that was the case.”

“It worked for me because I was a foreigner, I didn’t know anyone, and I was also a foreigner in the movie. My character was working here for a few years, but she wasn’t directly related,” she continues. “You have this more detached relationship to the country and the people. It helped to create certain loneliness between me and the group.”

Huppert is also all praise for the Filipino cast.

“This group of people we’ve managed to form, amateur and professional actors, the whole thing blended together so powerfully. It added for me not to know them as actors or non-actors. They were anonymous and even more believable, especially the Abu Sayaffs, right from the very first day,” she recalls.

One actor even stuck to her mind after filming!

“Ronnie (Lazaro), who is very sweet and adorable, was so horrible on the boat! He really looked like a real one and he was so scary!” she says with a laugh.

Now that principal filming is done, Huppert says that her three-week experience in the country has certainly been memorable.

“The whole thing together, Brillante’s energy, being in that situation, where you put all these people on a small boat and in the forest in the most extreme situations, under the rain and the natural elements, all of this contributed to really something unique. I’ve never lived through it before in my life,” she proclaims.

As to the prospect of working with Mendoza again?

“Yes, for sure! This is definitely my first time working with Filipinos and Brillante. I hope this is not the last,” she says.