"My first artistic emotion when I was very, very, very young was from a painting.’’ It was a 16th-century image of the Virgin Mary. "‘so pale, so transparent, almost blue’’. And that image, she says, explains what drew her first of all to Isabelle Huppert, beyond her abilities as an actor: the pallor of her skin, straight from 17th-century portraiture. ‘‘It’s my aesthetic.’’

Breillat is a guest of the Melbourne International Film Festival, which is screening her new film, Abuse of Weakness, starring Huppert and rapper Kool Shen.  It is, as ever with Breillat, confronting, unsettling, singular. Her films always bear her stamp, but the story of this one is particularly close to her own experience.  Yet, she is at pains to emphasise, ‘‘the story is the same but the characters are different’’.  And that’s a very important distinction for her.

In 2009 Breillat wrote a book, Abuse Of Weakness, which set out in unsparing detail what happened five years earlier when she suffered a debilitating stroke and became the victim of a well-known conman called Christophe Rocancourt, whom she had approached about playing a role in a movie.

Her film bears the same title as the first-person narrative, but the characters have different names.  Huppert gives a remarkable, committed and physical performance as Maud, a filmmaker who suffers a stroke in the first scene of the film.

‘‘She became much more like me than she intended to,’’ Breillat says. ‘‘Without me asking her to, and without her wanting to copy me. On the contrary.’’

As the conman, Breillat didn’t want to cast someone who resembled Rocancourt, whom she describes as ‘‘like a gigolo, always trying to charm’’. She was drawn to the notion of using a rapper, who could project the physical qualities she wanted.

Kool Shen was part of a poneering rap duo called Supreme NTM, and he’s now a professional poker player. They met, he did a screen test, and she felt very positive about it. And then, looking at it again, ‘‘I thought I had made a mistake.’’ He had the right attitude, the right physical presnce, but she wasn’t sure about how he said the lines. So she tested some other actors, before calling him again and trying something else. She gave him something completely different, she says, a seduction scene from her film A Ma Soeur. ‘‘He learnt it. And I panicked and thought, if he is bad now, how can I tell him?’’

Her assistant read the lines of the female character: they filmed in tight close-up, with Breillat watching the monitor intently. ‘‘I never look directly at my actor, just at the image. When I look at the image, it’s mine, when I look at them, it’s not the same, I don’t have the distance.’’  And what she saw, she said, was a transformation.  Even so, she asked him to do it again, because there’s always the need for second takes in cinema. And, she says, ‘‘it was so surprising and so beautiful. Me and my assistant, and even Kool Shen, we were in a sort of fever, and completely tired, without energy, but so happy.’’

‘‘And suddenly, he becomes the film, and I become the film, and we have the same point of view, as if he was myself. ‘‘ She brings her hands together, fingers interlaced, to demonstrate. ‘‘Like that.  And he knows that he wants to make the movie.’’

Abuse of Weakness screens on August 7 and 9.

Catherine Breillat talks to Margaret Pomeranz at the Wheeler Centre on August 8 at 7.30 pm.