Charlotte Gainsbourg on Kanye West, Lars von Trier and Busan

Charlotte Gainsbourg told a Busan International Film Festival masterclass audience that Kanye West is the one artist whose entire output she follows. "It's a very controversial artist, but I listen to everything he does, and it's Kanye West," she said, drawing laughter from the crowd. "I know, it's very easy."

She quickly offered a tamer alternative: when the music has to connect to her work, she listens mostly to film scores.

Why 'Melancholia'?

Gainsbourg is on her first visit to Korea, and she is in Busan with "Melancholia," one of four films she made with Lars von Trier. The selection came down partly to elimination. "Antichrist," their first collaboration, won her best actress at Cannes, but "Nymphomaniac" would have meant showing two films.

"I guess it was the easiest choice, 'Melancholia,' and also because selfishly, I want to see it again," Gainsbourg said, laughing. "I haven't seen it in 15 years." The screening followed directly after the session, and the moderator warned the audience they would lose about five minutes so Gainsbourg could watch it too.

What did she say about Lars von Trier?

Asked about the director himself, Gainsbourg was warm but measured. "Well, I can't say he's a friend, but he's a dear friend," she said. "I don't know him that well, but we exchange text messages."

When the moderator noted the public holds plenty of preconceptions about von Trier, Gainsbourg offered her own reading. "As a human being, he's very tortured. And that touches me. And in his films, he gives a lot of himself. He's extremely vulnerable," she said. "I've never learned as much as with him about myself, about the film, about being an actress."

An audience member asked how she approaches von Trier's women, who are at once powerful and powerless. "People exactly think that I am only one side. They think I'm fragile and soft and kind and respectful. I like to show the other side of me, and with Lars's films, I'm able to," Gainsbourg said.

Korea, family and her career's start

The interpreter described her filmography as more than 80 titles and began calling her prolific. Gainsbourg cut in: "Prolific? No, not prolific."

She was more expansive about her few days in Seoul. The Leeum museum opened its doors to her and her friends on a day it was closed, giving her the run of the place. She also ate what she called "a very special barbecue, Korean barbecue, that was incredible." The night before the masterclass, she joined a restaurant bar with actors and directors. "It was just so friendly to see people from the industry here just gathering, drinking a lot of alcohol," she said.

Her mother, the late Jane Birkin, appeared in Hong Sang-soo's "Nobody's Daughter Haewon" during a visit to Korea, and Gainsbourg said she would be very open to working with Korean talent. "I'm superstitious," she said. "So I won't say any names or anything, but I hope so."

Asked about her two most recent releases, she laughed: "What has been released? Nothing!" The film in question was "L'Affaire Marie-Claire," Lauriane Escaffre and Yvo Muller's drama in which she plays real-life lawyer and women's rights campaigner Gisèle Halimi. The film, centered on the fight for abortion rights, played in Cannes' Special Screenings section and opens in France on Nov. 4.

What comes next?

Gainsbourg is finishing an album she has worked on for years and hopes to make music videos for it; she directed her own on her last record. A feature film of her own is on her mind, but she said she would need a story so personal "that only me can do it" before she felt she had the legitimacy.

She also traced her acting career's beginning to a note her mother left her: "They're looking for a girl your age. If you want to try, here is the address." She won the part in "Paroles et Musique" after a casting process that came down to two girls, and "The Impudent Girl" followed. For years afterward, she said, she felt she had "stolen the right to be there" because she never trained as an actor.

Her parents have shaped her recent work. She spent 35 years trying to turn her father Serge Gainsbourg's house into a museum, and it came together over the past three years. Before it opened, she photographed the house while it was still private; those pictures became an exhibition in Arles last summer. "It was very emotional for me," she said.

Her 2021 documentary about her mother, "Jane by Charlotte," took about four years to shoot, including a two-year break. Birkin died in 2023. "She was happy knowing how much I loved her, I think," Gainsbourg said.

With a new album, a possible directing career and an openness to Korean collaborators, Gainsbourg's first visit to Busan looks less like a victory lap than a pivot point.