If anyone's interested in the translation, here it is:
Q: What is like being Vanessa Paradis after all these years of a career that started so early?
Vanessa Paradis: Even though I have success since a long time ago, the feeling of actually being aware of it only comes to me now. They propose more interesting movie roles to me and as for music, even if I know that I please the public, I understand that as from now I also please other artists, other musicians. I spent my life admiring others, but while I doubted it at first, I realize as from now that I am also admired. This opens new perspectives to me.
Q: Did you doubt yourself a lot?
Vanessa Paradis: We are never sure of what we bring, but I didn’t want to live my life being full of doubts either. Fear, questions can live inside of me before starting a project. But, from the moment that I am doing things, there is no place to question or hesitate, I don’t think anymore. And that’s what allows me to reach pleasure.
Q: Didn’t you ever want to choose between your two miscellaneous careers, between the singing and the movies?
Vanessa Paradis: Singing is something natural, I always did it.. Dance too, but a little less no doubt. And what pushes me into movies is a craving to be a part of a story, of a group. The stories that they give me to read that capture me and that make me feel like doing them or not. And then, what I love to work on a role is to read, read and read again more scripts. I free myself also from my mind or rather, the worry of the mind, the worry of questioning yourself what do to, how to do it.
Q: Nowadays, you live in Los Angeles, but you remain a very french singer, even parisian. Do you miss Paris?
Vanessa Paradis: I didn’t grow up in Paris, but in the parisian suburbia and I only went off to live there when I was 16. In the past few years, I’m no longer there. I come here to work and I miss this city so much. But, if someone asks me where I come from, I would say that I am a parisian, that’s where I built myself, it’s where my family and friends are. In my heart, it’s home.
In Los Angeles, everything is evidently opposed to Paris, extremely different, everything is extreme there. The size of the way people do things, everything is bigger: the proportions, the relief, the culture, the way people dress, the noise, what we feel. There is space and light. It’s very pleasing when we arrive from Paris and we meet again the light of Los Angeles. But when we are there, we get used to it, and you only need a few times. It’s also a city where we can get lost, without any center, with big neighborhoods. Because I am less famous there than in Paris, I go more often to bars to listen to music. In Paris, I do it less, I also have less time.
Q: Living in Los Angeles, is living as close as possible to the movies, isn’t it?
Vanessa Paradis: The Hollywood movies are the ones that I prefer.. As a little girl, long before singing, I loved the Hollywood comedies that had everything: cinema, music, dance. Among them, Singin’ in the Rain is the one that touched me the most, I watched it repetitively. What I loved to watch above all was the tv show That’s Entertainment!, that was made entirely of sketches of dance and songs from musicals, without the plot. That magic moment where the actors and actresses start singing moves me.
Q: This summer, we are going to see you in 2 movies, Cécilia Rouauld’s Je me suis fait tout petit and Anne Le Ny’s Cornouaille. The storyline of the last one brings to mind a Hollywood classic, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir with Gene Tierney…
Vanessa Paradis: Anne Le Ny asked me to watch The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Another Woman, a movie Wood Allen directed in 1988, with Gena Rowlands. What interested her, in showing me Gena Tierney, was the way she endures the situations in the movie. The girl in Cornouaille is restrained, strict. I built the character wanting to play someone that endures her environment, while being a strong and independent woman. It was necessary that she wasn’t happy being there, but still remained very polite towards others.
Q: In Cornouaille, your character shows up opposing your very glamorous image.
Vanessa Paradis: Odile, my character in Cornouaille, is a very simple girl and it’s that simplicity that Anne Le Ny wanted to reach no matter what. Making movies, to do the same thing over and over again doesn’t interest me, even if I love on the other hand to look beautiful, with makeup, dressed up. But doing only that all the time would be impossible.
Q: In Je me suis fait tout petit, your role is that of a girl that has accepted what she is..
Vanessa Paradis: It’s a role that I thought about a lot, often. I thought about it during the shooting, when I got home at night, when usually after a day of shooting a movie, I move on. Even if there are scenes that can stuck you in the moment, after a good night’s sleep, everything gets better.
Q: In this movie, the character is very sunny. Like you?
Vanessa Paradis: Sunny? I would like to be like that anyway.
Q: How do you choose your movies?
Vanessa Paradis: I look for strong feelings, I want to be upset, either positively or negatively. I want to experience something intense inside. Apart from that, there are no specific standards to chose to do this or that.
Q: When it comes to movies, what matters to you?
Vanessa Paradis: Once I am on the set, it’s what happens there that matters to me, that nourishes me, while I watch the team working. I love to watch people like that, I find them beautiful and I am never bored on set watching everybody, even if I wait my turn for 4 hours. I think that comes from my desire of not wanting to be inside my world, but of wanting to make it grow, so that is nourished by others. When a trusting relationship is established on the set, I am all ears, ready to perform. I love to be directed because it always takes me elsewhere, to the path of others and I dare to do different things.
Q: Aren’t you scared of doing low-budget movies?
Vanessa Paradis: I try as much as I can to make things simple, but it’s very complicated. I never did big-budget movies, only small productions. The same thing for my albums, I always make them with a small team.
Q: What did you learn by making music that it’s useful for you when it comes to movies?
Vanessa Paradis: When it comes to movies, if something doesn’t come to me right away, if I’m not able to achieve what I have to achieve, to have the right tone, I can make it by using my ear, like a song. But what the 2 universes have in common is the urge to let go, to let go of the sense of modesty, shyness, to lose yourself completely to the moment, to what’s there. When I act, when I sing, it always comes from the inside, from my belly. These are the relaxing moments, but also the ones of extreme concentration to be in the present moment. But also of not being completely relaxed neither. I ignore how that happens to me, all that I know, is that it’s an escape.
Q: In the movie Heartbreaker, there is a scene where we see you mime the lyrics of a Wham song and we have then the feeling that it’s one of the rare moments where the singer and the actress come together.
Vanessa Paradis: That only lasts for a few seconds… We have the tendency to be someone else while shooting. Even if I take a lot of myself into a role, I never really know what I really take nor where I take it. It comes spontaneously. The experience changes too.
Q: On stage, are you inhabited by the moment, by the music?
Vanessa Paradis: Yes, it’s invasive. I’ve seen myself going on stage without feeling like singing and then, the machinery changes me, music is therapeutic.
Q: Which female singers do you admire?
Vanessa Paradis: Girls like Feist, Keren Ann, Melody Gardot, Norah Jones, Joni Mitchell…
Q: You seem more at ease singing ballads. Is this a pleasure superior to others? What’s your relationship with your voice?
Vanessa Paradis: I don’t have a strong voice, so it goes well with ballads. It took me a longtime to love my voice, but I find it ok now. I can’t say it pleases me, what I listen is my interpretation, not my voice.
Q: How do you look at your albums, especially the last two, Bliss and Divinidylle, that are your most personal ones?
Vanessa Paradis: Music, it’s life’s moments. Listening to an album again, it’s seeing again faces, hearing voices, cries, living again moments together. I am proud of my albums.
Before Bliss, I was only an interpreter. But with that album, I succeeded writing and producing pieces. It’s exciting, terrifying. All the more because I was surrounded by talented musicians. Since then, I write songs and I’m terribly spoiled, because they always give me songs that I want to sing. I would prefer to be a complete artist that writes and composes all her songs, it would make sense to be someone that goes up on stage and tells everything that is on the heart. I can write songs, certainly, but not good ones, very few good ones. It’s such a pleasure to sing a good song that it makes me vibrate, I have literally vibrations on my body.
Q: Why did you make only a few albums?
Vanessa Paradis: Because I make movies. Time is what holds me back. I have another job. Nothing holds me back but time, I love my two jobs, I want to do both of them. Make a movie, is to enter fully into the universe of a director. Music, it’s alike, it’s inhabiting a song, an interpretation.
Q: You started with Joe le taxi. What feeling comes into you now with this particular song?
Vanessa Paradis: I always love to sing Joe le taxi, which is very symbolic and seems to make people happy as soon as they hear it during a concert.
Q: On Youtube, we can listen a recent version very calm and ethereal.
Vanessa Paradis: It interests me to make my songs evolve. This version, like all the others from the acoustic tour from that year, is due to my collaboration with the musician Albin de la Simone. By rearranging the old music tracks, he felt like giving a smack to Joe le taxi. And I found it magnificent.
Q: Are you haunted by your past?
Vanessa Paradis: I am nostalgic, but I prefer the present moment and I love to think about the future… We can’t make the same music for 20 years. My music doesn’t haunt me, I don’t listen to my albums, except when I have to start a new one.
Q: Do you fear, sometimes, that everything will end?
Vanessa Paradis: Certainly, even if I don’t say it like that. And also because, I was particularly very spoiled, success attracts success and offers. I was lucky, I loved singing right away.. I lived in the present moments, because nobody said that it was going to last, it was necessary to take what was there. I am fatalistic. Yes, I’m afraid, but I can’t do nothing about it, I can only try to do my best.
Q: Where do you stand with music, by the way?
Vanessa Paradis: I am making an album, I can’t talk about it because I don’t even know when I’m going to finish it, but I love this particular moment in the studio. It’s a moment apart, away from the family.
Q: Your kids will soon have the same age you had when you released Joe le taxi, 14 years old..
Vanessa Paradis: Yes, I know.. I don’t wish really to my kids the same thing that happened to me. I wish that they make what they feel like doing, even if I was protected by my very present, very restless parents. I realize now to which extend all those things must have been horrible for my father and my mother.
Q: Finally, Do you have the life you dreamed about when you were a little girl?
Vanessa Paradis: As a teenager, I didn’t have the time to ask myself questions, to dream my life. I don’t regret anything, I wouldn’t have lived all those things if I had stopped to question myself. It was inside me, I didn’t have the time to tell myself I was going to be an actress or a singer.
Credit for the translation goes to vanessaparadisnews on Tumblr. 
, the rest of the photoshoot is very nice, hope that someone can translate the interview
