Béatrice Dalle: All about lust

The actress Béatrice Dalle likes roles that reflect her personality. Which is why she leapt at the chance to play a sex-crazed vampire. She tells Fiona Morrow about taking life to the extreme

No one can quite believe that Béatrice Dalle is in London. She's one actor the press don't feel they can rely upon. Maybe it's the cuttings: a catalogue of drug busts, shoplifting beefs and – my personal favourite – an arrest for assaulting a Parisian "meter maid" who dared to give her a ticket.

This time, however, she's as good as her word, crossing the Channel to talk about her new film Trouble Every Day, directed by Claire Denis. And there is a frisson of expectation in the lobby of the Charlotte Street Hotel as assorted interested parties ponder what she might be like, how she might behave. "She's a lot taller than I expected," one insider confides, as though this might hold the key to the mystery of Ms Dalle.

It's extraordinary that an actor who has spent more than a decade starring in mostly ho-hum movies should hold such lustre. But it was her debut, 16 years ago, that really counts. A debut that made Béatrice Dalle an icon. Beautiful, volatile and very, very sexy, Béatrice Dalle is forever Betty Blue.

It may be two days before her 38th birthday, but Dalle's pulchritude is as ripe as ever. The bone structure of her face is simply marvellous: the dark eyes, the jutting jaw, the mouth as wide and full as Julia Roberts's and as erotic as the Hollywood star's is ginger-peachy.

As she stands to shake hands, her vertiginous heels help Dalle to tower above me. She settles back on the sofa behind a fog of cigarette smoke, and I notice that the shoes are itsy bits of black suede with ankle straps, the heels in question appearing to contain pink glitter; peeping through sheer, black tights, her toenails shimmer gold.

Dalle smokes like she means business, systematically filling the ashtray perched precariously between us on the upholstery. As she speaks, though she keeps her body very still, she can't always control her hands; her tight, black drainpipe trousers are quickly specked with ash which she occasionally – carelessly – brushes away.

But it's the voice that draws you to her, literally. Dalle speaks in little more than a whisper, forcing you to lean in to catch her drift. Even though I don't speak French, I find myself braving the carcinogenic haze to get that little bit closer to La Grande Bouche. And though I may not understand the words, there's plenty to glean: Dalle's head movements speak volumes, by turns sassy, confrontational and subtly flirtatious.

Her words, however, are mediated through a translator. An English gent of a certain age, his fags are the unapologetically Gallic Gitanes. He's charming, perhaps a little too much so: I may not parle Français, but I can spot a profanity at a hundred yards and this guy is definitely cleaning things up. I sense he fancies himself gallant.

Trouble Every Day is a love story, of sorts. Fuelled by blood lust, it's a reworking of the vampire genre, filtered through Denis's trademark obliqueness. Her previous film was a masterpiece – Beau travail – and, though this doesn't scale the same heights, it is similarly sparse of dialogue, lush with music (here by Tindersticks) and erotically charged. To spell out the plot is to strip it of sense; suffice to say that Coré (Dalle) is locked into a dangerous sexual tryst with Shane (Vincent Gallo).

Plot, it turns out, is the least of Dalle's concerns. "I didn't come to the project because of the story," she shrugs. "I don't care about the story – I never do. If I like a painting, it is the painter that interests me. It is the same with film – I am interested in the director."

"It is the human contact with the director that interests me," she continues, voice barely above a murmur. "Sometimes I don't even bother to read the script beforehand, and don't care to see the movie afterwards." She punctuates the end of the sentence with a flick of her chin. "What interests me is to be an instrument."

Her desire, she says, is to be directed – being given a free hand to do as she pleases bores her. If that sounds curiously submissive, it isn't really: Dalle chooses who she works with very carefully. She looks at the films first and is drawn to directors who share her sensibility: "Claire... [Abel] Ferrara." She sighs, as if so much should be obvious.

She suggests there's a certain serendipity at play: "It happens that often I am dreaming of working with a particular director and then, without me saying anything, they propose a film to me. It's nice that it happens that way so frequently."

Nevertheless, things don't always work out as well as she hopes. I note that she has worked with a high number of female directors and she pulls back, wrinkling her nose. "Yes, it's true, and it is something that I regret," she spits. "What I admired about these women's films was the rawness, the directness, and it's what I hoped for in working with them. But I found they were too preoccupied with evening the score with men and that doesn't interest me – it's boring."

"I'm not anti-feminist," she adds, quickly. "Far from it. But this wasn't feminism, it was a battle with the male cast and crew. Some of the finished films I find quite wonderful, It was their working methods I disliked." She stubs out a fag with some force.

"Claire, of course, is exempt from this. With Claire, I was face to face with a human being, with all the poetry, rawness and directness I was looking for."

"Claire and I have a very particular way of working together," she continues. "It was somehow an instinctive performance with strict guidelines from the director."

I ask her how she found working with Vincent Gallo, and Dalle's face is transformed: suddenly she is pure vixen. "I knew Vincent quite well already," she answers slowly, rolling the words around her mouth. "He is very intelligent, very poetic. How you see him on screen is how he is in life." Her eyes flash as her mouth widens further: "He is a very, very dangerous man."

The sex scene didn't pose any particular problem: "It is natural," she says, dismissively. Still it was, she concedes, hard work: "You really do have to lose your temper with each other and you are physical – you can't stop, you can't prevent the consequences of what you are doing to each other. It's very draining and very painful."

It doesn't, however, give her as much pain as my next question – about all those stories of drugs and delinquency: "Pah." The contempt crosses all language barriers. "This is only a problem with the press, whose main motivation is private lives. These are things that would be a problem only if they caused me to lose so much as one day on set. They haven't, so there is no problem." The subject is snapped close, with a fierce look of defiance.

I change tack. Is she tired of her name being synonymous with Betty Blue? She shakes her head. "It's not a burden. It was my first film and for me it was not just about making a movie, it was my life. And at the same time, I was in a love affair equally intense as the one on screen. It's a very good memory for me." So she is happy to be immortalised as Betty? "Immortality is not something I think about very much," she counters. "Life is not immortal. What is important is to live life now."

She looks for work that explores her desire for immediacy. For her, acting is less about make-believe and more about extracting one's soul. "I don't like roles too far away from myself. There has to be something which relates to who I am and how I feel – it's not about a challenge. I'm not looking for an acting challenge."

I ask her what it is about a murderous, sex-crazed vampire that she can relate to and she looks deep into my eyes before answering. "If you act something like that you fall into parody. You have to have lived something very close to that, to have taken life to the extreme in order to convince."

"I understand the violence of love that is expressed in the film," she purrs. "The violence of love that can harm, can hurt and can move somebody is something I am very aware of."

She pauses for a mischievous smirk: "Of course I have never gone so far as to kill one of my lovers."

'Trouble Every Day' opens on 27 December