"I've Loved You So Long," Sony Pictures Classics, 2008

While you were filming, were you confident about entrusting Phillipe and his crew with your performance? With this one in particular, because of the nature of the character and the performance, I'd imagine it as a leap of faith.

When you make a film, you sign a contract with somebody, and it's not only legally binding but morally binding. You agree to give this man a certain number of weeks of your life, and you just go for it, as much as possible. Because, whatever happens, the film is going to come out, so you might as well try very hard to make it a good one.

I was drawn to this role because I was really drawn to exploring abandonment and fear and dread and all these negative things that we all have a fear of. Everyone has nightmares about doing something terrible, everyone has nightmares about being forgotten, and this woman is living that. It's the unspeakable crime, as well. I've always been interested in that -- there was a story that moved me about a woman who had five children, and one of them killed somebody else. She came from this very bourgeois, French background where everything's always perfect. What happens when people do these dreadful things -- not just to the victim, but what happens to them? How do they come out at the other end?

While I was doing research for this role, I spoke to a number of people who work with prisoners. Phillipe, my mother-in-law, works with prisoners, she's a shrink, and she told me that a long-term prison sentence is an incurable thing, that it's impossible to come back from it into a normal existence. Every testimonial I was able to get my hands on all said the same thing: it's permanent damage.

She's sort of brutal, like "I am a human being, I have done what I've done, it's my secret, and I'm not letting anyone else in on it because it's mine." And it's the thing that keeps her alive, that secret, because it's the only thing that no one can get from her. Everything else has been taken from her -- her life, her livelihood, her husband, her child as well. Everything's gone, her dignity, everything, except for this secret, which she hangs on to, and I find that very moving.

It's seems ironic that she has reached this state of comfort with herself that a lot of people aspire to as a result of this experience.

Right, like this is who I am, like it or lump it. She doesn't want anything from anybody.

"I've Loved You So Long" opens in New York and L.A. on October 24th.

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