Olivier Assayas mentions Kristen

Casting Juliette as Juliette, in terms of how the audience perceives her, is kind of a thread in the casting of most of your movies. Asia Argento or Kim Gordon, for instance, in Boarding Gate, or Maggie Cheung in Irma Vep. They have their public, celebrity image, which you use to an effect in all of those films.

Yes, it's always been in the background. Here more than the others it's in the forefront. It's basically the subject of the film. But I didn't realize it until late in the process: the fact that I was using Juliette as Juliette. And then that somehow contaminated the whole film. All of a sudden you were looking at Kristen as Kristen and Chloe playing someone who she's not, but could easily have been. You know, it's a movie where you always keep in touch with whatever you know about those individuals, those actors.

You said that originally you were thinking of casting Kristen in Chloe's role.

We kind of moved back and forth between the two parts. But I think the best approach was using her as Valentine.

You didn't cast her in a part where you could say, "Oh, there are aspects of Kristen there," but in a part that forces her to basically comment directly on herself. She has that line about Chloe's character: "Well, at least she's not some antiseptic celebrity..."

Right, yes, exactly.

It's that public perception of her as being sort of aloof because she doesn't fit a certain definition of starlet.

Right, and those are the sort of actresses that I'm attracted to working with and find interesting.

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