It also sounds as if Chabrol picked up Hitchcock's working method, planning everything in advance, hiring the actors who fit the parts and letting them do their jobs. "Chabrol is a very mysterious guy," Sagnier says. Apparently, the director didn't assign her any old movies to watch, nor did he want her to read anything about the actual 1906 murder case upon which A Girl Cut in Two is based. "He didn't want me to refer to anything. He just wanted me to react the way I would naturally react. The less I made up things, the happier he was. I thought that I'd get some details watching Gus Van Sant's To Die For (1995), because she's a weather girl and all that, but I quickly found out that Gabrielle is much more pure than the Nicole Kidman character, who is a war machine. Gabrielle is somebody who's very ambitious, but she's not carnivorous. She thinks she's very clever, and she's much more naïve than she thinks."

Ludivine Savignier with Francois Berleand in Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two.

Sagnier landed the job simply by taking a telephone call. She says she thought she was being hired on the basis of her work with Francois Ozon in the three films Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000), 8 Women (2002) and Swimming Pool (2003). But in actuality he was more interested in her performance in P.J. Hogan's 2003 take on Peter Pan. She quotes his reasoning: "He said, 'You have been Tinker Bell. You know what it's like to be radiant. You know what it's like to fight with old pirates. You know enough. So do your job.'"

Sagnier has just finished shooting an epic gangster film entitled Public Enemy No. 1. She breathlessly describes the exploits of the hero, a man twisted and corrupted by the Algerian War who turns to crime and becomes a famous robber and a media darling. Her character comes in during the film's second half. "I'm a young and naïve prostitute," she says coyly, almost laughing. "But it was an action movie with a big crew, guns, fighting, chasing, so I thought that was really exciting."

Sagnier is also doing a lot of reading -- "the Russians," she says (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc.) -- and a little singing. When pressed for details, she merely smiles and says, "You'll see." An avid movie fan, she has put movies on hold for a bit, though being in San Francisco has inspired her to watch more Hitchcock. She also was wlling to list her favorite Chabrol films, including Le Boucher (1970), Story of Women (1988) and La Ceremonie (1995). "I've seen ten or fifteen maximum, because there are plenty of them that are not findable. I asked Chabrol if he had tape(s of them). He just said 'No!' and shrugged."