Audrey Tautou has this thing with journalists: she takes their photograph. She started doing it soon after the release of Amélie, when she became, almost overnight, one of the most in-demand interviewees on the planet. She waits until the end of your allotted slot, asks politely if you'd mind, then points her Leica at you and presses the button. She has no idea how many of these snaps she has taken - "maybe as many as 400, I guess" - nor what she is going to do with them, but they are her compensation for the time she has spent, over the past few years, sitting in over-decorated hotel rooms talking about herself.
"They're just kind of lost hours for me," she says, apologetically. "All that time talking totally about myself, which is of course a fascinating subject but not exactly new and exciting for me. And then the interviews appear, and obviously there's not really going to be anything very new or exciting for me in them either, because I was the one being interviewed. I wanted there to be something in the whole process for me. I'm thinking of maybe turning them all into table mats. That was a joke, by the way."
For this latest series of interviews Tautou is in an upstairs room at the Electric Cinema in London's Portobello Road, where the air conditioning has been turned off at the request of the TV crews (it messes up the sound). It is, consequently, extremely warm. French cinema's hottest property of the moment - the only actress, apparently, whose name alone is now enough to secure major foreign investment for a French feature film - seems pretty chirpy, though, in a dark blue frock and with her hair all up in braids.
She is tiny; seemingly far too fragile in real life to be the shameless screen siren she has temporarily become. Tautou is here to promote Priceless, a romantic Riviera romp with a bit of a dark side. It is directed by Pierre Salvadori and co-stars Gad Elmaleh, a very funny young Moroccan-born Jewish comic whose hugely popular one-man shows are about the closest France gets to really good stand-up. Tautou's part, though, is something of a new departure: she plays a sexy gold-digging vamp hunting for an elusive rich benefactor who will keep her in the style to which she'd like to become accustomed. It is all pouts, flounce, exceedingly skimpy evening gowns and (on occasion) frilly underwear; a long way from the wide eyes, sensible cardigans and clumpy shoes of Amélie Poulain.
"Irène is radically different to anything else I've done," she says. "Terribly feminine, very seductive, hard-bitten, cruel sometimes, but with this fragility underneath. She's a complex, a rich but also a funny person. I adored playing her; I adored making the film. Pierre has always been one of my favourite film-makers, and he wrote the part for me. As soon as I read it I couldn't think of anything better."
Still a bit of a shock, though, seeing Amelie stripping off to not very much and rolling around on a bed. "Everybody says that," Tautou says, a touch tartly. "But I've never had a problem with Amélie. It was everyone else who seems to have identified me with her; I never did. Amélie was a very precise, a very composed performance - ultra-defined, down to the tips of her fingernails, the ends of her hair. Irène, too, is like that, a very composed, very defined character, her clothes, her hair, her shoes, her nails. They're still just characters, though. I've honestly never had an Amélie hang-up. She's not someone I'm trying to escape from."
It is now just over seven years since Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's whimsical tale of the shy, coy, kooky and almost unbearably cute Paris waitress whose secret good deeds improve the lives of her fellow citizens, hit France's cinema screens. Eight million people in France flocked to see the film, and as plain Amélie it went on, the following year, to become the highest-grossing French movie ever in both Britain and the US.
In fact, Tautou only got the part because Emily Watson dropped out, nervous about her French and the fact she had just accepted a role in Gosford Park. Jeunet famously saw a poster for Venus Beauty Salon, the 1999 Toni Marshall film for which Tautou won the César - a French Oscar - for best newcomer, and fell instantly for "a pair of dark eyes, a flash of innocence, an unusual demeanour".
The daughter of a dental surgeon and a teacher, Tautou had grown up in Monluçon, north of Paris, and dreamed of becoming a primatologist. The whole acting thing, she says, came about when her parents offered her a two-week summer course at the prestigious Cours Florent theatre school in Paris as a reward for getting good grades in her baccalauréat. Impressed, the school offered her a place on its full-time programme, which an anxious Tautou somehow managed to combine with a literature degree at the Sorbonne before winning a young actors' competition run by Canal Plus in 1998 and landing her first modest film roles.
Obviously, the Amélie phenomenon changed things quite a lot. "It was very difficult to go from relative anonymity to such huge success in such a short space of time," she says. "Not professionally, I mean - I had no worries about that, I was always in work before Amélie and I was fairly confident I would be in work after it. I know what I'm worth as an actress: not the best in the world, but not bad either. Personally, though, it was not easy. It's like a magnificent gift now to go to wherever, to Tokyo, say, and see all these people who were plainly so touched by this film. But I couldn't go where I wanted when I wanted any more; I couldn't take the metro. That was a bit of a drama."
She has clung on to a few parts of her old life. "If people saw where I lived ..." she offers. "It's a rented apartment in the 9th arrondissement, 60 square metres, nothing special at all. I'm really not interested in all that; maybe it's to do with having been a Girl Guide. That was a joke. No, but really, I prefer to do things that are nothing to do with being a star: I travel a lot, I read, I try to learn new things. I'm just beginning to realise that it may be time for me to start taking the trappings a bit more seriously."
Since Amélie, Tautou has taken her doe eyes, dimples and gleaming smile to (among other films) Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things, Cedric Klapisch's Euro-diptych Pot Luck and Russian Dolls, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's bloody first world war drama A Very Long Engagement, and - somewhat controversially - Ron Howard's immensely tedious The Da Vinci Code, opposite Tom Hanks. On balance, she says of the latter, she enjoyed making a big-budget movie, but is in no particular hurry to head for Hollywood.
"I think they saw just about every actress on the planet for that part," she says. "I really didn't think I was right for it either. But I enjoyed the glamour of flying to LA for 12 hours to audition, I enjoyed the adventure of it all, and of working with amazing talents like Ian McKellen and Paul Bettany. But it wasn't Hollywood; it was shot mainly in Paris and London. And it's certainly not my dream to drop everything for Hollywood. It's hard for French actresses there, you know. And you need a drive, an ambition, a courage that I'm not sure I have. What I'm doing now, this rhythm, it suits me fine."
What Tautou is doing now - filming starts this summer - is Coco Avant Chanel, a new biopic about the younger days of the fashion designer. "It's a really interesting time," she says, "the period before she was famous but when everything was there, all the ingredients in place, to allow us to see just why she became Chanel. A very exciting project." From 2009, coincidentally she insists, Tautou also takes over from Nicole Kidman as the face of Chanel No 5 perfume, in a commercial to be shot by Jeunet.
What Tautou is looking for from this and indeed all her roles, she says, is "an enriching experience". So was there much of that to be had in the seductive charms of Irène? "Oh, yes," she says, forcefully. "Irène works in a register that was absolutely unfamiliar to me. She's all about appearance, feminine wiles, flaunting herself. That's not me at all. I wasn't sure I could be credible in a role like that; I was quite nervous about whether it would work. In the end, I was intrigued to see how little you actually have to do of that kind of stuff for it to work: it really doesn't take much to catch a man."
Oh, I think it worked, I assure her. "Exactly," she says. "Doesn't take much." And reaches for the Leica.