Being directed by her son in a psychological thriller was a little bit disturbing in itself, actress Charlotte Rampling tells Steve Pratt

WHEN Barney Southcombe was adapting the script for his feature film debut, one face kept coming to mind for the leading character of an enigmatic femme fatale – his mother’s. She is actress Charlotte Rampling, and he thought she’d be perfect to star in the psychological thriller I, Anna.

Things almost fell apart when she broke her wrist two days before shooting was due to begin, but she went through the film with her arm in a plaster cast after Southcombe worked the injury into the story.

Rampling plays divorcee Anna, who becomes embroiled in a murder investigation after a man she meets at a speed dating event is found bludgeoned to death in his flat.

“Barnaby had to find a way with the screenwriter to make the injury work in the script and they found something brilliant, a manifestation of something,” she explains.

“She doesn’t remember how she breaks this wrist, which is all part of the story and part of the strange state that she’s put herself in because she’s too frightened to remember what she’s done.”

Rampling was drawn to Anna, who’s making ends meet in a tiny apartment and hiding a painful past under her cool facade.

“There is a vulnerability about these types of women; life hasn’t really worked out the way they’d hoped it would,” she says.

“Things have happened and events have hit them so hard, they’ve lost track, and they’re just very borderline people.”

She can identifying with the character saying: “There’s a lot of Anna in the character that I am. There are many different phases in my life that could almost be parallel to certain parts of Anna, that Barnaby has seen as a child or an adolescent. You see different states of mind, different states of being that your mother can go through.

Maybe not understanding or asking, but you absorb it.

“Anybody that has a fragility like Anna, I can really understand, because the sorts of defence mechanisms that she has are very necessary for a while until you can release sometimes the horrible truth, which she has to.”

Was filming such a dark tale easier because of her bond with Southcombe? “Yes and no. It’s closer and it’s more alienating,”

she says. “There’s a disturbing aspect to it which is really quite useful, and there’s also a quality that you feel very safe because you’re in almost a womb-like sort of strangeness, that you’ve produced this character and now he’s turning you into something. There’s good psychoanalytical substances in there to make for, hopefully, good art work,” she adds, breaking into a warm laugh.

Rampling recalls their “mother-son heist” on Irish actor Gabriel Byrne in a New York hotel to persuade him to play Anna’s love interest in the film. “I said, ‘Barnaby, get on a plane’, so Barnaby got on one and we literally caught Gabriel, he was at the Mercer Hotel and he was leaving the next day and I was just in New York for two days.

Barnaby came in especially, and we just – whoosh – caught him!”

Rampling, now a grandmother to Barnaby’s two boys, spends most of her time in Paris, but keeps a home in the UK. “There’s a lovely way of life in France. You might not even like the French very much, or French politics or whatever, but their way of life is superb,” she says.

“And Paris is a very creative city. I’ve lived there a long time now, but I always keep coming back to London. I’ve kept a place here and I love London because it’s my roots.”

THE actress may be of the age – 66 – where most people would consider retiring, but the prospect terrifies her.

“I wouldn’t dare, because I think I’d just close down. I’d be frightened that I’d never want to get up again and I’d lose contact and I’d just be sitting with myself all the time and I don’t think I want to do that,” she confesses.

“I get so much life back from working. I’m out there now with a lot of young people, because most of my stuff is now with people of my kids’ age, and that’s fantastic.

They’re such a great motor – you keep up with everything because you’re in it with them, so you don’t have the time to think, ‘Oh, I’m getting on a bit now’.”

  • I, Anna (15) is now showing in cinemas