Natalie's intimate affair

I have travelled all over the world to promote Une liaison pornographique - to Italy, Israel, and Calcutta. The film works well in all these places because the love story is so universal. It's about a man and a woman (Baye and Sergei Lopez) who separately recall their memories of an affair to an interviewer. It is rare in a film written by a man that a woman gets to talk about her desires and fantasies without being judged.

I hadn't heard of the director Fr?d?ric Fonteyne when I got the script and I was surprised by the title - I didn't think I would be the right actress for something that was called "pornographic". But when I read the screenplay I was won over from the very first scene. I was struck by the quality of the dialogue and the fact that the people it portrayed seemed so true.

The day before filming I realised that I didn't know anything about my character - not even her first name, or her job, or whether she was married or had children. I felt scared but then I understood that the strength of the film was that these details weren't important. The characters are unknown, and the fantasy they share is never revealed.

The set was very cosmopolitan. We had a crew from Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland, a Spanish actor and a French actress. At the end of shooting I was sad because I had got to know my character and her contradictions much better than other parts I have played in the past. Jean-Luc Godard once said to me that as an actor you can be proud if you've been involved in four of five really good films. I know that Une liaison pornographique is one of my best.