https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6476179/Vanessa-Paradis-happy-daughter-Lily-Rose-Depp-19-chosen-career-spotlight.htmlL'interview:
first met Vanessa Paradis a little more than a decade ago around the release of her album Divinidylle. Everyone wanted to be her back then. They wanted her hair — so luscious and tawny. And they wanted her life — houses across France and California and a loved-up long-term relationship with Johnny Depp. I remember her from that time as happy, pleasant and sweet.
She’s been famous for most of her life. Born in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, a commune on the outskirts of Paris, to middle-class boho stock. It was her uncle, an actor and producer, who encouraged her singing career. She appeared on a children’s talent show aged seven. At 14, she had a worldwide hit with Joe le Taxi — a saucy little number, sung entirely in French. I remember watching her perform it on Top of the Pops; a tiny thing with a silky, girlish voice in an even smaller tight black dress. After that she became an actress, winning a César (France’s Oscar) at 18 for her debut movie, Noce Blanche. She dated a string of French creative luminaries, as well as the rock star Lenny Kravitz. But it was her relationship with Depp that really captured the world’s gaze.
They got together in 1998. I remember interviewing Depp once and him describing being drawn to her as an instant compulsion: “You have this feeling — I can’t really explain what it was, but I had it when I met Vanessa. I saw her across a room and I thought, ‘What’s happening to me?’ I had no way of knowing how great a person she was or how great a mother she would be. I can remember thinking the last thing in the world I wanted was a relationship, but it was impossible to escape. I was gone.”
Later, I also got her version of events: “The thing is, I loved him before I was with him, but we had met,” she told me. “We met in his club [the Viper Room in Los Angeles] in 1993 and we together in 1998. I remember perfectly the first time. He just shook my hand and I thought, ‘OK, that’s it’ … He didn’t only look good, everything was good. He was so sweet, so different. He just seemed like a good person. I just knew … there was no one better. I would rather be alone than be with the wrong one. I’d been with the wrong one for a while and I was just never going to do that again … You just have to jump in and see if you end up on your feet or your nose.”
It’s no secret she helped tame the Hollywood wild boy. He stopped drinking spirits and was filled with joy when their daughter, Lily-Rose, was born in 1999. It was, he said, “not just the greatest thing that’s ever happened, but the only thing that’s ever happened. I helped give my daughter life and I felt she gave me life.” Three years later, a boy, Jack, arrived.
Her relationship with Depp ended in 2012 after he met the actress Amber Heard on a film set. Depp quickly married Heard, but they divorced in 2017 after she alleged he was violent towards her, which he denies.
Today, Paradis has no recollection that we have met before. We are in Paris. For some reason, she wanted to do the interview here, in a guitar showroom — despite the fact we were both in LA a few days earlier. So here I am, 6,000 miles from home in a windowless room surrounded by Gibson guitars.
She arrives late with an entourage and goes straight upstairs without acknowledging me. There’s an uncomfortable blankness about her when she finally comes down to meet me. She is wearing skinny jeans and still looks as good as she did as a teenager in the Joe le Taxi video, though her face is more careworn, her hair wispier.
Her new album, Les Sources, is very pretty. She sings in a wistful, breathy French way that sounds as though she is having sex. Maybe she was — she wrote the album with her new husband, the director/writer/actor/all-round French guy Samuel Benchetrit. That must have been interesting, I say, though really I am more interested in why, at 45, she decided to get married, given that she lived with Depp for 14 years and had two children but never tied the knot with him. Did she have something to prove after he married Heard?
I don’t ask that. Instead, I politely inquire what the title of her album, Les Sources, means. “You know how we French are,” she replies. “We’re tricky. One word can mean many things. The source can be a spring. It can be a source of inspiration.”
The album “is full of songs that talk about love, the essentials — love and nature and hope. We don’t live in a dream world, but we can grab what’s dreamy about this world.”
Did she and Benchetrit fall in love during the making of the album? “We were already in love. I was already there,” she says.
Like Depp and Heard, they met on a film set. Benchetrit was the writer and director of the French comedy drama Chien, and Paradis “played a small but interesting, beautiful part”. Of course. Obvious typecasting.
They married in the middle of making the album, but she is reluctant to talk about it. “It doesn’t really matter. Marriage is not what matters,” she says. “It’s not anybody’s business but mine and his.”
It seems odd that she is uncomfortable mentioning her husband in an interview to promote the album of love songs they made together. Still, I persevere. It must be great that you don’t have to be apart if you also work together, I say.
She looks at me suspiciously. “Well, you do because our work makes us travel, but that’s fine.”
I’m already exhausted because the interview is not really a conversation. She sounds like she’s reading from an Autocue. I change tack. At 14, when she had her big hit, she was heralded as a “provocative nymphet”. Did she feel grown-up at that age?
“No, I felt 14. Like most teenagers, I wanted to be an adult. I wanted to go faster.”
Her life was quite traumatic. At 15, she would wake up to graffiti outside her building in Paris reading “Vanessa is a whore”. She was bullied, shouted at and even punched in the street. “Yes, it was tough because it became an everyday thing.”
Was it mostly teenage girls? “No, there were guys also. I think some people really couldn’t stand me. But I think some joined in and they didn’t even know what they were doing. It was like a hysteria. And I have to say I thank them for doing it. It helped me not to be full of myself, being told I was crap every day. Really, it was a great service. It helped me be stronger and concentrate on the essentials and not myself.”
What had she done to inspire such hatred? “I sang a song. I was overexposed on radio, on TV. I was everywhere. People couldn’t digest me.”
I wonder if she worries about her daughter, Lily-Rose, who is currently on billboards everywhere as the face of the Chanel fragrance No 5 L’eau, and like her mum started her movie career at a young age. According to one story, Paradis despaired of the movie industry with its lecherous producers. “I never said that,” she corrects me. “I’m really happy she’s where she should be. She’s very talented and makes great choices about what movies she does. She’s pretty much made for the job.”
Does she sing too? “Not professionally.”
But she writes songs? “What? No! I don’t want to do an interview about my daughter.”
I’m just trying to clarify facts, I explain.
“It’s just you’re digging into personal things.”
Well, hardly. In terms of things I’d like to ask Paradis about — what life with Depp was really like, how she felt when he married Heard — asking if her daughter writes songs seems a pretty innocent line of inquiry.
OK, let’s move on, I say, and there is a pause in which I could have baked a pie. One of her entourage swoops in and says: “We need to keep the interview focused on the album.” I turn off the tape recorder while I explain that I do need to ask some questions beyond the album, but if that’s not going to be possible then perhaps I should just go.
Paradis stands up and I turn my tape recorder back on. “You’re in a weird demeanour,” she accuses me. “Like maybe you don’t want to be here.”
Shall we just start over? “No,” she replies curtly, and then to her entourage: “She may be having a bad day. I don’t want to be responsible for that. It’s super-aggressive. She wants to go and she’s just waiting for us to tell her.”
Obviously, I don’t really want to go, I have travelled 6,000 miles to be here. But I’m disappointed that she’s so boring and closed.
“I think she’s looking for trouble and I’m not going through that,” she rants on, before turning her attention back to me. “I think you have a problem.”
The British PR steps in and tries to get us to be civil. I try to pacify Paradis with the most innocuous, album-related question I can think of. Does she do any vocal workouts before going into the studio?
“Yes, I warm up the voice and hurry to the studio. It’s such an exciting process.”
Yes, clearly riveting. Er, does she avoid dairy when she’s singing? “Oh no. I have the worst discipline. I try to be careful when I’m on tour. Every day is a new audience and you have to please the people that came to hear you.”
Hmm, what a shame such civilities don’t extend to me. The interview is clearly going nowhere, so we call it a day. I leave, shocked by her oversized entitlement and with one big question left: whatever happened to that sweet, happy girl I met a decade ago?
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Mar 20 Fév 2018, 17:52
Mais la couverture est sympa!! 
