IN The Eighth Day, the new film from the director of Toto The Hero, Daniel Auteuil plays a workaholic sales director who has sacrificed his family life to the demands of his job and whose life is governed by an invariable daily routine. It is the kind of role which Auteuil has made his own and which has established him over the past 10 years as one of the most popular of French film stars. He is a reflective actor, and his delicate technique is based on the interiorising of emotions. It found one of its best expressions in his role as the frozen-hearted violin-maker of Claude Sautet's Un Coeur En Hiver (1993) in which he depicted, to touching effect, one man's gradual emotional awakening.
In person, Auteuil has the distance of the natural observer, and his quiet charm cannot disguise his apparent unease with the public relations side of film-making. He guards his private life carefully, the result perhaps of the intrusive publicity over the break-up of his long-term relationship with the actress Emmanuelle Beart (those who care about such things may like to know that he seems perfectly content in his present relationship with another actress), and he is hesitant when discussing his craft.
"Daniel can't really talk about what he does," says Claude Sautet, who also directed Auteuil opposite Sandrine Bonnaire in Quelques Jours Avec Moi (1988). "His acting comes from inside him, from here." Sautet puts his hand just below his waistline.
I mention Sautet to Auteuil, and the actor beams with pleasure. "Claude is my spiritual father," he says. "The true reward of filming comes when the director uncovers aspects of your personality which even you have not recognised before. This helps you in your private as well as professional life. In this respect, Sautet has revealed a lot of me."
The revelation of Auteuil as a remarkable screen actor came with his portrayal of the wily and pathetic peasant Ugolin in Claude Berri's hugely successful two-part adaptation of Marcel Bagnol's Jean De Florette and Manon Des Sources in 1986. A former singer with a solid record as a stage actor, Auteuil had been in films for 12 years when Berri's films brought him to international attention. "Until Ugolin, I had often been out of step," Auteuil says. "If you appear more intelligent than the role you are playing, it's not good."
As Ugolin, Auteuil was able to subsume his intelligence into the tragi-comic cunning and lovestruck obsession of his simple-minded character. His brilliant performance garnered reviews which immediately put him on a par with his more famous co-stars, Gerard Depardieu and Yves Montand. He found himself able to take his pick of film roles, but decided to return to the theatre for 18 months before accepting an offer from Sautet.
"The role I played in Quelque Jours Avec Moi was at the opposite end of the palette from Ugolin. From playing an ugly, uncultivated extrovert I went to play a well-groomed, intelligent introvert. This helped convince other directors that my acting palette was large." The film was not shown outside France, and it was not until the release of Coline Serreau's romantic comedy, Romuauld et Juliette, that foreign audiences discovered that there was a good-looking leading man hiding behind Ugolin's peasant features.
In Serreau's film he played a businessman whose life is changed when he falls in love with the black woman who cleans his office. This set the seal on his association with middle-class characters undergoing mid-life crises which has continued in such films as Un Coeur En Hiver, Ma Saison Prefrree and Christian Vincent's coruscating account of a disintegrating marriage, La Separation.
"It was a cycle which has now come to an end," Auteuil insists. "It allowed me to seize on a weakness in a person and to make that weakness the centre of the change he was going through. It was good for me to explore such characters, and I was keen to do it, but now I want to move on. I have done several films which don't fit into that category, such as Le Reine Margot."
He has. recently reunited with Andre Techine, the director of Ma Saison Prefrree, for a thriller, Les Voleurs, which has just opened successfully in France, and he is about to start work on another costume role in a swashbuckling epic.
Auteuil was appearing on stage in Belgium when he first met Jaco Van Dormael, director of The Eighth Day. "Although we did not know each other, Jaco had written the script of Toto The Hero with me in mind," Auteuil explains. "He gave me the finished screenplay and I didn't understand a word of it. But then he showed me three of his short films and I saw at once that this was a director with a lyrical style whose films had an element of magic in them. Unfortunately, I wasn't free to do Toto but I agreed to do any other film he proposed without needing to read the screenplay. Just as well, for when he gave me the script of The Eighth Day I didn't understand that either!" Auteuil laughs.
He is, he admits, an instinctive actor who does minimal research on a role, preferring to allow things to happen freely in performance. "This works well for The Eighth Day which is less of a narrative than Toto - the film is driven by emotions which are powerful and violent."
The turnaround for Auteuil's character, Harry, comes after a chance meeting with Georges (Pascal Duquenne, who has Down's Syndrome) who insists that Harry take him home. Duquenne has been a professional actor for over 10 years (he had a role in To to) and Auteuil is clearly delighted to have shared with him the Best Actor prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival. It was not a sympathy vote; as Auteuil has said, "among actors with Down's Syndrome, Pascal is Brando."