Why I hate l'amour

Yvan Attal thinks French films about love are boring. With one exception - his directorial debut, in which he stars with his wife, Charlotte Gainsbourg. He explains all to Fiona Morrow

Yvan Attal is sitting in the library of the Covent Garden Hotel. It's not exactly a coincidence – the wheels of PR rarely allow for such things – but still, one can't overlook the fact that parts of his debut movie (out next week) were filmed within these walls. "It's a very nice hotel," shrugs the Frenchman, as if that much should be obvious.

Though it's past midday, he looks newly risen. He apologises for rubbing the sleep from his eyes – he nodded off on the Eurostar from Paris this morning. Attal is one of a growing bunch of actors who have retreated behind the cameras. What distinguishes him is not that he has chosen to also star in the film, but that he has chosen as his subject the difficulty of being married to an actress (as he is), and cast her – Charlotte Gainsbourg – in the lead. But My Wife is an Actress is not, he insists, autobiographical: "Yes, I'm an actor and I live with an actress, but what I was interested in was playing with reality."

To begin with, he made a short: a six-minute scene in which the husband of an actress is berated by a stranger over the emotional depths of screen kissing. Then the director Claude Berri persuaded him there was a full-length movie lurking in there.

Which is how Attal came to play Yvan, the husband of a famous actress, Charlotte (Gainsbourg), in a film that he wrote and directed about the pressures of make-believe love-making on a marriage. At the script stage, Gainsbourg wasn't sure; the couple keep their first names and Gainsbourg wears her own clothes. "She was concerned we would be seen as inviting the press into our lives, when we sometimes have to fight to maintain our privacy," explains Attal. "She was also nervous that I wanted her to be herself – she couldn't understand where the character would come from." He had to persuade her? "Just a little bit," he smiles.

If she had remained reluctant, he would have still made the film, but only as a director: "I would have tried to find another acting couple," he says, before adding, with a smirk, "I might have considered Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, for example."

Though not quite the box-office certainty that such a cast would have secured, as a bilingual comedy, My Wife is an Actress does throw off the sometimes weighty baggage of French cinema. Was it a deliberate decision to make the movie more accessible, less – I search for the right word – intimidating?

Attal snorts loudly, before dissolving into laughter. "People don't find French cinema intimidating," he answers, finally. "They think it's boring – you can say it!" He's wide awake now: "It's really funny the way you want to be nice about it. French movies are fucking shit! You can say it." He pauses, to fix me in the eye. "Except about mine, of course.

"I am often bored when I watch French films – not all the time, of course. But I think mine has a rhythm and an energy – it's not a man and a woman in a room saying that they love each other, they don't love each other anymore, they never loved each other..."

He sighs at the sheer tedium of it all, before asking: "Have you seen the film?" I am, I assure him, in these matters at least, a professional. "Well, you never know," he smiles. "Sometimes I say I don't like films that I haven't seen just to have an argument."

It's a character trait that, one suspects, could prove rather unfortunate on a film set – particularly when he's directing his wife. "Ah," he nods. "When you're the director, you're the boss. And when you go home, you think you're still the boss, and then it becomes tricky. So there's a problem, and then the next day on set, you have a problem with your leading actress because the night before you had a problem with your wife." He smiles. "After a few weeks, it begins to get difficult."

For all the sticky moments, Attal insists that he would do it again: "It is a mixture of moods and feelings, but it is also great work together – I can't think of another actress I would prefer to work with." He adores his wife – it's obvious. So isn't a film in which husband and wife play themselves, while not playing themselves, in order to explore the concept of infidelity, on some level dangerous? "Yes, perhaps," concedes Attal. "But it's not my real life, really."

Nevertheless, film sets are notoriously fecund environments for extramarital activities. "That's true," he concurs. "A film set is a bubble and the psychological effects of the job can be tough. You have to decide what the best way to lie is – that's part of an actor's job. If I have to love you in the film, maybe the best way to be good is to feel real love. That's why the game is dangerous – you can fall in love for real or, rather, you think it's real.

"But even without your emotions becoming confused, it can be tough," he continues. "Just on a physical level. You're shooting a love scene: you're in the bed, naked, with a woman who is not your wife. You kiss her, you touch her. It isn't for real, but on some level it is, and you can have a very real desire for this person. It can be hard to go home afterwards and talk about what's for dinner. Often, you don't want to go home that day." He pauses, then adds: "You're a man, she's a woman; everything is done to make you push it."

Though he struggles with that part of his own acting career, he's much breezier on the subject of his wife. "I've always felt shy about my on-screen relationships but, to be honest, I never have a problem with Charlotte having to kiss an actor or make love."

A thought strikes him: "I heard that the partner of Kerry Fox wrote an article about her role in Intimacy – that, I think, shows that he has a real problem with it. For sure, she must have suffered in the filming – they were tough scenes – but for him to feel the need to comment, well..."

Does he think that too much is expected of actors when it comes to sex on screen? "It depends why you are shooting it. You have to make a point – that they love each other, that the man is brutal, that they have fallen out of love. So, you have to make a point beyond the act but then, it's also a challenge to shoot it. Why can't we? It's part of life."

Though he's working on another script, for the moment he's back to his day job, acting in the new Jean-Paul Rappeneau film, Bon Voyage alongside Isabelle Adjani and Virginie Ledoyen. Possibilities for tough emotional or physical scenes aplenty, then. "Ah, yes," Attal says dreamily. "I have a scene with Isabelle and Virginie, where they just can't get enough of me... No," he smiles, "not really. Actually, I am in love with Virginie but she doesn't even notice I exist." A situation which, I am sure, makes it pretty easy to go home at the end of the day, to be with his wife.