In this novel, you speak of the diary that, on the advice of your grand-father François Mauriac, you kept during the shooting of the film. Does this journal still exist ?

Yes, but I decided not to refer to it, to trust my memory, to only keep what remained. That would allow me to be free, to change the chronology… Nonetheless, after the first version of Jeune fille, I re-read the journal. And it is not nearly as good as my novel. It is much more anecdotal.

The novel restores the freshness of a journal written in the present tense, without the import of experience and hindsight…

It is to find this freshness that I use the first-person “I”. But I doubted this decision until the very end. At the moment of printing, I still wanted to turn everything back into the third person… I think that with Bresson, I lived a rather unique experience. During an entire summer, to get to my room, I had to go through his, we shared the same bathroom, I was isolated from everyone, and the crew called me “the little prisoner”. I don’t think that he had ever such an exclusive relationship with a young girl that he filmed. For my part, no film shoot would ever mark me so profoundly. Probably, because it was the first time. It is so important… someone who gives you the feeling of living for the first time.

How does one become a writer after having been an actrice?

It is something that I had very much repressed and that came back after I turned thirty, quite simply because as an actress, I’d traversed periods of unemployment that were longer and longer, and harder and harder. I wrote in my little corner, I had my friends read the texts, Jacques Davila, Jacques Fieschi. It was he who told me: "You will not spend your whole life doing this, it is grotesque. If you don’t send them to an editor, I will send them myself.”

Did you not have the feeling of having been “kidnapped” multiple times ? By the cinema, by leftism all these “electroshock” encounters that sort of de-programmed you from your existence as a young bourgeois girl?

Yes and no. In any case, I was determined to leave my family, my environment, that weren’t right for me. I had lost my father. My grand-parents sustained, my brother, my mother and I. I knew that I didn’t want to live that anymore. Somehow, I would have sought to enter the working world and to cut all of that off.

One would have never guessed that the character of Jeune fille would become two years later the young Maoist of La Chinoise and that five years later she would become the muse of Dziga Vertov’s group in the films calling for armed action... How did this metamorphosis into the incarnation of leftism take place…?

It took place completely despite myself. I never liked the Dziga Vertov group. It was terribly complex because at that moment Jean-Luc (Godard) and I were separating. Plus, it was impossible to be 20 in 1968 and not espouse the movement. In Nanterre, in 1967, I became friends with Daniel Cohn-Bendit. We would cry together: "Solidarité des rouquins !" (Solidarity to the redheads!”) (laughter). He was very funny. But I left university for cinema without taking my exams, which cut me off from the student movement. I was working on La Chinoise, and suddenly the audience thought this person was me. Juliet (Berto) and I did not understand the half of what we were saying. Jean-Pierre (Léaud) had a harder time, would apply himself with much seriousness to the reading of Marx.

How did your grand-father, François Mauriac, interpret all of it?

In 1968, Jean-Luc got very upset with him. My grand-father wrote me a beautiful letter telling me that he respected my commitment, that he couldn’t but understand that a young person would take this path. He was of a great tolerance. But he participated in a demonstration at the Arc de Triomphe with Malraux to demand the return of the General de Gaulle. Jean-Luc wrote him a a horrible letter in which he accused him of being an old idiot. I was very irritated that my grand-father would do such a thing, but I was disgusted by the violence of Jean-Luc’s action.

In Jeune fille, you describe the first encounter with Jean-Luc Godard, and you conclude: "But that’s another story”. Do you think that you also will tell this story?

It is much more complicated for it is my real private life. And obviously his as well. To tell it, I’d have to find an angle. I don’t write it off. But not right away: It would seem to me as if I’d be using a recipe.

Interview conducted by Jean-Marc Lalanne and Fabrice Gabriel, Les Inrockuptibles