The Father of My Children: Love Streams

She and Assayas later became a couple, and now have a baby daughter. If Assayas has influenced her professionally, it has been to make her independent, she says. She prefers to talk about the influence of Bresson and Eric Rohmer, "who've haunted me over the years. With Bresson, what's most important is the quality of transcendence in his films, though I myself am not religious. What affected me the most about Rohmer was his clarity and the simplicity he brought to questions that are infinite."

Toward the end of The Father of My Children, a power outtage leaves Sylvia, her daughters and a producer friend in the dark. They light candles and head outside. "The scene has a sense almost of communion, because they are finding themselves, paradoxically, in this obscurity, and they're very present at that moment," Hansen-Løve explains. "I think this scene is potent because they have the opportunity to look up and see the starry sky, which reminds me of the starry skies painted by the American artist [Vija] Celmins. The idea was to show they were going back to the essential."

Actress-turned-auteur Mia Hansen-Love

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• Robert Bresson
• Olivier Assayas
• Humbert Balsan
• Lars von Trier
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Her next film will trace "over the course of seven years, the life of a young woman who has never come to terms with the loss of her first love, but it also deals with how she reconstructs herself." Is this one autobiographical? Hansen-Løve, who has been speaking French through a translator, breaks into English for the only time. "I don't want to answer this question," she says with a nervous laugh. "I cannot."