THERE’S no need to worry, Kristin Scott Thomas assures me, as she’s getting offered roles she wants. “Well, I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t want to do it. Because I’ve learned my lesson. But do I get a lot of offers? Yes,” she says.

It’s not a question of parts not appealing to her.

“It’s the whole thing. It’s the project, it’s the whole investment. You are going to invest quite a lot of your time and energy doing this so you want to be sure of the man you’re working for – the woman you’re working for, even though that’s pretty rare – the people you’re working with, the other actors, where it is, what it’s about,” she explains.

“I’ve done some pretty different things. Last year I went to Thailand and shot a film with Nicholas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling – that was an easy choice. And then I came back to England and did a period drama about Charles Dickens with Ralph Fiennes and Felicity Jones, so you know, it gets quite varied and now I’m on strage.

So I like to keep things different, for me.”

That variety is the reason she likes French roles. “I started working a lot in French cinema because I was really fed up with playing snooty, cold, distant people and I found that in France the roles offered much more guts,” she says.

“They were much gutsier, and they were more alive and more real. I fell in love with them much more easily. I was fed up with feeling sorry for my characters.”

So for every English-speaking Four Weddings And A Funeral and The English Patient you’ll find she’s made several French movies. She was on the spot, so to speak, having married (and now divorced) a Frenchman and moved to Paris.

Her latest French film is writer-director Francois Ozon’s sophisticated comedy In The House/Dans la Maison, which sees her playing a modern art gallery owner. Her home life is disrupted when her teacher husband (Fabrice Luchini) takes a close interest in a teenage student and his essays about his experiences with the family of a fellow student he’s befriended.

She was asked to be in the movie by the director, who’s worked previously with Charlotte Rampling, another English actress who works extensively in France. Scott Thomas had to turn him down because she was doing a Harold Pinter play, Betrayal, on the London stage. “So that wasn’t going to work and then the schedule changed and then I was able to do it so it was a miracle and everyone was very happy,” she says.

As you’d expect from her previous comments it wasn’t so much the character as the whole project that was the attraction. She found the screenplay “really very funny as a read”, she says.

“I was also very intrigued and excited about the idea of working with Francois on this kind of project, because I love his comedies, I think they’re great. And to be working with Fabrice Luchini.

The part read like something I could really take in and I would be very comfortable doing that part. And I really wanted to say those lines with Luchini, I thought that would be great.”

Given that French isn’t her first language it must make doing comedy that bit more difficult?

“As I say, it was the character that I felt very confident about, but the comedy is another thing, because it’s a question of rhythm and timing, but knowing Francois is very good at that – as is Luchini.

“But I was relieved to find when we were shooting it that Francois is extremely precise and extremely organised and can ask you to deliver lines in a very, very precise way, so basically the fear was taken away. I was told how to do it. But it worked. And it was very easy working with Luchini, as I’d suspected.”

THE film reunites her with Emmanuelle Seigner, with whom she starred in Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon. But they only worked one day together in an art gallery scene.

Ozon, who’s sitting beside her during the interview, reminds her there was a scene between the two of them, but he cut it in the editing room.

“Why did you do that?” she asks, eliciting the following exchange: Ozon: Because it was a sex scene.

Scott Thomas: Oh, that one!

Ozon: It was not very interesting for the film. It was a confusion between the reality and the fiction, and everybody was lost, so I preferred to cut it. I prefer that the audience has in mind the film of Polanski where they had a very good scene, a sex scene, a dance sex scene with Emmannuelle.

Scott Thomas: Those were the days.

Ozon: A long time ago.