Francois Ozon, always a leading ladies’ man

ON a dreary, rainy morning in Toronto, French filmmaker Francois Ozon reads the newspaper and sips a diet soda as he waits for Jeanne Moreau.

One of the grandes dames of European art cinema, Moreau has starred in such classics as “Jules and Jim” and “Diary of a Chambermaid” and has worked with a diverse group of directors that includes Michelangelo Antonioni, Orson Welles and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In Ozon’s newest film, “Time to Leave,” which opened July 21 in Los Angeles, she has a small but pivotal role as the grandmother of a self-centered photographer (Melvil Poupaud) who’s grappling with the news he has cancer and is soon to die.

Moreau makes something of an entrance as she crosses the sprawling hotel suite, dropping one shoulder and executing a small stutter step. Elegantly dressed in white trousers and a black tuxedo jacket, she offers a visiting journalist something to drink before settling onto a couch and arranging her cigarettes and lighter in front of her.

But the politesse evaporates when the journalist shifts his attention to ask Ozon how he came to cast such a legendary actress in his film. “So I don’t have to be here?” Moreau interrupts. It’s more statement than question, and before receiving an answer, she’s picked up her things and walked out.

Ozon’s unblinking nonchalance gives the impression that he is used to used to handling the occasional diva moment. In addition to Moreau, he’s worked with such luminaries as Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, Isabelle Huppert and Charlotte Rampling as well as such younger spitfire ingenues as Virginie Ledoyen and Ludivine Sagnier, and he’s developed the requisite delicate touch and unflappable outlook.

A seemingly natural-born charmer with a playfully firm yet polite manner, he reflects on the art of wrangling the outsized personalities of his singular leading women as he sits, months later, in the offices of Strand Releasing, the film’s American distributor, preparing to present “Time to Leave” at the Los Angeles Film Festival. He’s currently finishing the English-language “Angel,” starring Rampling and Romola Garai.

The director, 38, says he first realized his affinity for working with actresses, particularly older ones, while directing Rampling in 2000’s “Under the Sand,” a mood piece that set out the themes of grieving and loss he returns to in “Time to Leave.” (Rampling also appeared in what is likely Ozon’s best-known film in America, the hazy, sexed-up mystery “Swimming Pool.”) Ozon is aware of what veteran performers bring to the screen, the resonances of prior roles.

“It’s part of the game in the casting,” he explains. For “8 Women,” the star-studded comic whodunit that brought together Deneuve, Huppert, Ardant, Ledoyen, Sagnier and Emannuelle Beart, “I didn’t originally have the idea for the cast to be big stars. Suddenly the casting director realized it would be funny to have the fight in the film be between two recognizable actresses. So you want a fight between which diva and which diva? You work with the image.

“I’m a cinephile. It’s very different when you decide to discover someone or when you work with an actor who already has a career. For Charlotte, she had a very glamorous, very erotic image during the ‘70s, and in ‘Under the Sand’ I asked her to be a very casual, very normal wife. We tried to play against her image, but I can’t change who she is -- she’s beautiful and sexy.”

With the attention Ozon gets for his work with actresses, it is easy to overlook his affinity with male actors, apparent most notably in the fine central performance he gets in “Time To Leave” from Poupaud, a young actor esteemed in France.

Still, directing him was a challenge, Ozon says. “I wanted to work with someone my own age and try to do the same work. It was very difficult -- I didn’t have the right distance. I have to say, it’s easier when I work with actresses because I know better what I want.

“Sometimes I had the feeling of being in front of a mirror, seeing myself, and I hated that. I do films to be behind the camera, not in front of the camera. I’m sure I say very intimate things about myself in all my films, but it’s better to say it not too directly, to be hidden behind a woman.”

Ozon tailored Moreau’s role to make it more closely conform to her own life, including offhanded details she had revealed to him -- the vitamins she takes, her habit of sleeping in the nude.

“When you have an actress like Jeanne Moreau,” he explains, “you can’t forget it’s Jeanne Moreau. So the closer she is to the character, the better. The way the scenes are shot, it’s the heart of the film -- you have to believe in those scenes. If you see Jeanne Moreau in the film, it’s not a problem.”

That’s not to say working with cinema legends is without its frustrations. Ozon has learned that the care and handling of such actresses, who carry great cultural meaning both on and off the screen, requires equal parts sensitivity and whip-cracking.

“To be a star, an icon, is very heavy. The problem with this kind of woman, especially Jeanne or Catherine Deneuve, they have been such huge stars since when they were so young, they can be disconnected from reality. And sometimes they are in a bad mood -- it can happen. But they are clever enough that if you tell them ‘Stop now,’ you can say that to this kind of woman and they come back to reality very quickly.”

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‘Jeanne! Jeanne!’

WHEN his star makes her abrupt exit from the Toronto interview, he treats it as a non-event, chatting amiably on his own about the film. But he appeases a nervous interviewer by shouting from his seat back into the deep recesses of the suite.

His few firm yelps of “Jeanne! Jeanne!” are finally met from somewhere by a throaty “Oui!” -- and a second entrance that is a few notches grander than the first, the shoulder dropped a little farther, the shuffle step more pronounced. Once Moreau settles back onto the couch this time, she is spellbinding, traipsing continents and decades in recalling the ups and downs of her life as an actress.

Her career intersected with Ozon’s when he was making the short films that preceded his first feature and she sent him a letter of encouragement. Ozon says he knew then they would one day work together.

When he approached her about “Time to Leave,” “the first time I spoke to Jeanne she said, ‘I hope it’s not the grandmother.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, but it will be.’ ”

Moreau, 78, jumps in. “In a way it was a joke, but in a way it was serious. Anyway, we spoke about the role, and you didn’t have much work to convince me.”

In explaining what attracted her to “Time to Leave,” Moreau recalls other decisions she’s made in what she prefers to call her life rather than her career.

“The amount of roles I’ve turned down for one reason or the other,” she says. “I rejected ‘Cuckoo’s Nest,’ the nurse. She’s a terrible woman, I didn’t even think about it. And I refused the part in ‘The Graduate,’ the woman who is jealous of her daughter.”

“For me, that was a mistake,” Ozon coolly notes.

“I know,” says Moreau, “when I think about it, it was a mistake.”

Ever the diplomat, Ozon counters, “But Anne Bancroft is so amazing, it’s good for everybody.”

Ozon’s deft handling of his performers has a payoff in the surprisingly nuanced and emotionally charged performances he elicits from people who could just as easily slide by on star presence alone. In the most heartbreaking scene in “Time To Leave,” Poupaud’s character reveals to Moreau’s that he has chosen to confide in her because she too will die soon. The directness of the line is shocking and drew scattered gasps at the Toronto Film Festival.

“Some people laugh sometimes. It’s so cruel,” Ozon says, “but so real. It’s something you are not used to saying in life. You can say it’s not polite, but at this moment, it’s very honest.”

And how did it feel to be on the receiving end of such a remark? “I like that,” Moreau says. “That’s life, and that’s what makes the relationship extraordinary. But I don’t think about such things much. People think I’m an intellectual, but I’m not.”

“I had it from the beginning,” says Ozon. “I thought it was the key to the relationship between the two. But I didn’t want him to say that cruelly, he had to be very tender. I like that contrast.”