The silhouette is the most important thing in clothes. Every French girl knows that. High-waisted trousers give you long legs and a pretty bum which, after all, is what we all want.
Lou Doillon
I like costumes. I am always dressing up - I'm very English like that.
I listen to a variety of music. The only common point is strong lyrics; I'm more obsessed with lyrics than music. I need to hear a form of truth, and if it's a hard truth, even better.
In a modern world where a majority of women say, 'I don't need you, I've got my money, I've got my stuff,' I say, 'I desperately need men.' My whole album is a tribute to men. It takes a man in me to tell you that I'm on my knees for men.
I think I was pretty much hated in France. The French press ignored me. There was a movement when the children of celebrities faced strong animosity.
I'm a very compulsive person, so I spend most of my time drawing or writing my diary, patching things up and carving bits of wood - I've carved two of my guitars.
There is an image of me in France that is a long stretch from who I really am. I read about this girl who lives in grand hotels and has affairs with American actors - I don't recognise this girl at all. Sometimes it makes me depressed. Sometimes it makes me laugh. Sometimes I think, 'Gosh, that sounds nice, I'd love to be that girl.'
I hate short hair on men - the 'real' man is something I don't know. My dad was always playing with hairbands, making rings, while the women were wearing jeans, white T-shirts and Converse. That was the uniform at home.
I always have lipstick, and use the same lipstick for my cheeks as blush, so that it looks very natural. It's a good trick I learned from my mother. I like NYX or MAC because they have a lot of pigment and they're matte.
I always loved singing, but I thought it was like drawing - just something you do in your own little corner to calm yourself down. But when my friend, the French songwriter Etienne Daho, listened to my songs, he was so moved that told me that I had to do a demo, share them with the world.
I'm in my father's car at age 9 or 10 crying to Leonard Cohen's 'Famous Blue Raincoat,' thinking that you could write nearly a love letter to a man who betrayed you by having an affair with your wife. I was thinking how wonderful and pure music can be for explaining situations.
I was kind of ashamed of my bourgeois family as a teenager, I guess - I had dreadlocks, shopped in thrift stores and pretended I had no money. At that time, I would have spat on a girl who was buying Yves Saint Laurent.
The whole process of music for me is something absolutely honest and really naked and bare, so I never forced myself to write in French.
My mum is deeply, deeply a man's woman, a man's muse. Maybe because I'm a kid from the '80s, I'm a bit more dominant. I wanted to be the muse and the director also. I wanted to be the man and the woman.
I try to not listen to all the girls I admire musically - like Nina Simone - just so I don't find myself imitating them, even if it's subconsciously.
Luckily, I was raised by a kind of gypsy family, which is why I always get along better with people who worked in circuses than with kids of other actors. My mom was so carefree with us in a beautiful way. We were used to sleeping anywhere.
The more you're writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention - even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it's at your own scale - other people relate to it much more.
I have a strong and strange character, and I've rarely met directors who knew what to do with this character. One of the few who did was my father, and in the theatre, Arthur Nauzyciel.
My mother always spoke to me in English, so it's technically my maternal language, and it became a kind of private language - I was happy that I could speak in English to my mum and the majority of people wouldn't understand it.
What I realized is that the desire for making 'Places' came from the fact that I've got this strange situation with having been born in the glitter, born on the other side of the mirror that everyone fantasizes about.
As a little girl, I had huge fantasies about music.
I'm a bit of a contrarian, so I like the idea of going on stage without makeup, without the hair being done, in the jeans and shirt I've been wearing all day. At first that was an issue, because I didn't want to be disrespectful.
If Rihanna stripped it all down morally rather than with her clothes, perhaps we'd get closer to Nina Simone. She's talented, but all we want is to sing the truth. If Britney Spears was to sing closer to her heart, she might have been the new Bobby Gentry or Dolly Parton.
Home has always been wherever I am. I'm not very attached to walls - or people, for that matter - so I've always loved travelling around. A book in my back pocket, a diary, and a pen is all I need to call any place home.
I love acting; I love movie sets and movies, but, at the same time, there's something about the position of women in that world that frightens me a lot. I find it nearly inhuman to be an actress.
The whole point of art school is that you're going to be able to have nudes all day long and a teacher who is there to move you. It's great. I did a tiny bit in the one school in Paris, and it was wonderful because you'd have a nude taking a crazy position, and you'd have 10 seconds to do a drawing. Then you'd do a one-minute drawing.
I was such a tomboy. I had absolutely no bosom, and I wore my hair really short - shaved, like a boy.
In England, you laugh at yourselves; in France, we laugh at others.
I've always found that fashion is, first of all, mainly for yourself. So my two icons are, on one side, Little Edie from 'Grey Gardens' and, of course, like all my generation, I'm influenced by Kate Moss.
I was raised by muses. Women who had men in awe of them and who wrote them movies and wrote them music.
There was this really rock n' roll guy who was very obviously dragged to my concert by his girlfriend. He had tattoos all over, and he was wearing a Metallica T-shirt. He came up to me said it was one of his favorite concerts because I had reached for his heart and dragged it out and put it in front of his face.
The French press can be very harsh, and the one thing they can't bear is multi-tasking. They despise it to the highest degree, so from the age of five I've been taught that if I did two things at the same time, it meant I didn't know how to do one. It's an obsession that they have.
Singing is the rawest thing. Having been naked in films or naked in photo shoots, it's nothing compared to singing. It's absolute nakedness. You are stripped bare! It's very strange. Acting seems much easier, in fact, because you are putting on a costume - whereas here, you are taking everything off.
I always lived with guitarists. When they would leave, I would just pick up their acoustic guitars and start doing finger picking and write.
I have a huge scarf from Hermes that I bought the day I signed my record deal. I had never had an Hermes scarf. And I ran to buy one, thinking, 'Now, this is a symbol, I need one, I need an Hermes scarf,' which actually now I'm quite embarrassed about. Most of the time I twist it so much that no one notices it, and just bundle it around me.
With fashion, my mother was an icon, but she never lived it in the sense that she was never obsessed with fashion. When I was a young girl, my sister wasn't doing fashion, so I started fashion thinking, 'I'm going to do something that they haven't done yet.' That was my silly scheme at the time.
The English and Japanese are the most inventive dressers in the world, but French girls are the most beautiful. I am still always amazed by the style of French girls, and the only reason is that they dress according to themselves and not according to fashion. They know what suits them.
'Blanche' opened a new door for me without really making me more famous. 'Blanche' was a risk, but that is the only thing that excites me in this profession. The knowledge that I am an actress who takes risks lifts my soul.
My mother taught me to wash my hair as little as possible, and to rinse it with Coke before a shoot for a sexy, tousled look.
My mother is old-fashioned; she raised us like girls from a 19th-century book. My sisters and I are known for being the most polite girls in France. My mother wanted us to be like royalty: never ever will you be caught being rude, or superficial or being a star or whatever.
I've always had a strange acting life. I'm the daughter of a director, and a very French, typical director who fell in love with every single one of his actresses. And that's also something that's kind of normal in the acting business, because everything is based on desire, one way or the other.
I picked up the guitar very late, in a very pagan way - I didn't know how to play, but I knew I had to. I drew and I had a diary, but it wasn't enough; I needed to express more. As soon as I learned two notes, I started to tell a story, which is why, I guess, my music resembles blues or folk.
To be an actor is to be ambiguous in every form, which is a very hard way to live. You represent desire: the desire of the director and the desire of the audience, even if it's a subconscious desire. If a director is to work with you for two months, he must be in love with you in some way or another.
My mission is to get on the stage and say, 'Listen, I'm a woman, I'm free, I'm a mother, I'm a lover, I'm a friend; I'm shattered by men most of the time, but I'll keep falling in love with them because it's the most thrilling thing in the world; that's what makes me human.'
It took me so long to get to the music, where that was what I wanted to do all my life. It took me so long to realise that it wasn't really movies that I wanted to do, but to be on stage singing.
As an actress, you're part of what the director is creating, and as a model, you're representing a designer's vision.
I was always the funny-looking girl. I couldn't compete with the Brazilian girls. My nose is off, my ears are too big. But I think it's my personality that these designers were drawn to.
