Charlotte Gainsbourg on Listening to ‘Controversial’ Kanye West and Working With ‘Tortured’ Lars von Trier at Busan

Charlotte Gainsbourg had one artist to recommend to the crowd at her Busan International Film Festival masterclass, and it was not a safe pick. “I’m not good for recommendation. I have one artist that I listen to, very controversial artist, but I listen to everything he does, and it’s Kanye West,” Gainsbourg said, to laughter from the audience. “I know, it’s very easy.” She followed up with a tamer pick. If it has to tie back to cinema, she said, film scores are what she listens to most. Gainsbourg, who is on her first visit to Korea, is in Busan with “Melancholia,” one of four films she made with Lars von Trier. The choice, she explained, came down partly to elimination. “Antichrist,” their first collaboration, won her best actress at Cannes, but “Nymphomaniac” would have meant showing two films. Popular on Variety “I guess it was the easiest choice, ‘Melancholia,’ and also because selfishly, I want to see it again,” Gainsbourg said, laughing. “I haven’t seen it in 15 years.” The screening followed straight after the session, and the moderator warned the audience they would lose about five minutes so Gainsbourg could catch it. Then the conversation turned to von Trier himself. “Well, I can’t say he’s a friend, but he’s a dear friend,” she said. “I don’t know him that well, but we exchange text messages.” The moderator pointed out that film fans and the wider public hold plenty of preconceptions about the director. “As a human being, he’s very tortured. And that touches me. And in his films, he gives a lot of himself. He’s extremely vulnerable,” Gainsbourg said. “I’ve never learned as much as with him about myself, about the film, about being an actress.” An audience member wanted to know how she plays von Trier’s women, who are at once powerful and powerless. “People exactly think that I am only one side. They think I’m fragile and soft and kind and respectful. I like to show the other side of me, and with Lars’s films, I’m able to,” Gainsbourg said. When the interpreter described her as having a filmography of more than 80 titles and began to call her prolific, Gainsbourg cut in. “Prolific? No, not prolific,” she said, laughing. She was more expansive about her few days in Seoul. The Leeum museum opened its doors to her and her friends on a day it was closed, giving her the run of the place. She also ate what she called “a very special barbecue, Korean barbecue, that was incredible.” “Yesterday was fun, because I got to go to a bar, a restaurant bar with a lot of actors and directors, and it was just so friendly to see people from the industry here just gathering, drinking a lot of alcohol,” she said, drawing more laughs. “It was fun.” Gainsbourg’s mother, the late Jane Birkin, appeared in Hong Sang-soo’s “Nobody’s Daughter Haewon” during a visit to Korea, so the moderator asked whether her daughter had any Korean directors in mind. Gainsbourg said she would be very open to working here, and that she is fond of Korean cinema and talent, having already met a few members of the local industry. “I’m superstitious,” she said. “So I won’t say any names or anything, but I hope so.” When an audience member asked about her two most recent releases, Gainsbourg laughed. “What has been released? Nothing!” she said. The film in question turned out to be “L’Affaire Marie-Claire,” Lauriane Escaffre and Yvo Muller’s drama in which she plays real-life lawyer and women’s rights campaigner Gisèle Halimi. The film, which centers on the fight for abortion rights, played in Cannes’ Special Screenings section and opens in France on Nov. 4. She is also finishing an album she has been working on for years and hopes to make a few music videos for it. She directed her own on her last record. A feature of her own is on her mind, but she said she would need a story so personal “that only me can do it” before she felt she had the legitimacy. Gainsbourg also looked back on how her acting career began. Her first audition, for “Paroles et Musique,” came via a note her mother left her: “They’re looking for a girl your age. If you want to try, here is the address.” She got the part after a long casting process that came down to two girls, and “The Impudent Girl” followed. For years afterward, she said, she felt she had “stolen the right to be there” because she never trained as an actor. Her parents have been a big part of her recent work. Gainsbourg spent 35 years trying to turn her father Serge Gainsbourg’s house into a museum, and it finally came together over the past three years. Before it opened, she photographed the house for herself while it was still private, and those pictures ended up as an exhibition in Arles last summer. “It was very emotional for me,” she said. The 2021 documentary she made about her mother, “Jane by Charlotte,” took about four years to shoot, including a two-year break. “I think she was happy about it,” Gainsbourg said. Birkin died in 2023. “She was happy knowing how much I loved her, I think,” Gainsbourg added.