OC Played A Word Game With Audrey Tautou

The mark of a movie star is a person who can make you feel special and important in all situations––even 15-minute interviews (timed by PR teams) in aggressively beige hotel rooms. Audrey Tautou is that kind of celebrity. When we met her at the Soho Grand on the eve of the US release of her new film, Mood Indigo, she somehow managed to charm us into thinking we spoke perfect French, that our questions about her photography hobby were insightful, and that we weren't the umpteenth people she was retelling how she met Michel Gondry, the film's director.

The thing is, it's a great story! Tautou and Gondry first met at a party a decade ago, but the actress––ever "wild," in her words––wandered away to grab a cigarette and forgot to come back. Years later, the director invited her to the opening of his exhibit L'Usine Des Films Amateurs in Paris, and, soon, asked her to be in "the movie he'd wanted to do his whole life." Fittingly, the invitation came by way of an animated short: "[Michel] writes a letter and flies over the ocean to bring it to me," she remembers. Later, she returned the favor, sketching the stop-motion cartoon that concludes Mood Indigo.

We minded hearing the owner of the cutest pixie cut on the planet tell the story again about as much as we minded watching Amélie for the seventh time. (Translation: pas de tout.) And, if you like watching charming French people saunter around a Paris made even more cinematic by Surrealist knick-knacks, you'll probably love Mood Indigo. As Chloé, the actress takes a sightseeing tour of the city with her beau in a flying-saucer cloud, dances to jazz by stretching her legs out like Gumby, and speeds through the church where her wedding is taking place in a boxcar. Later, she develops a terminal illness when a water lily begins growing in her lungs (the film, which starts out in vibrant color, eventually fades into black and white). 

In the Surrealist spirit that permeates Mood Indigo, we asked Tautou to play a word game with us and list her obsessions on various topics. Below, a few things you might not discover in another interview.

Audrey Tautou's Obsessions:

to read: Conversations with Picasso by Brassaï
to know: I like to know who I'm dealing with.
to eat: Shabu-shabu
to drink: It's summer, so it's rosé time!
to play: La pétanque, a French game like Bocce where you throw balls. The little town where I come from in France was the world champion of this for many years.
to hear: Horses by Patti Smith. I read her book and I like it so much I don't want to finish it. I still have like, 20 pages, and I have been traveling with it from place to place.
to wear: Oxfords
to sleep: At least eight hours
to hang: With Patti Smith. She's become my companion and I don't want to leave her!
to watch: The Life Aquatic