Paul Verhoeven's Elle was received in the dying days of the Cannes Film Festival with an excitement bordering on rapture. "All at once this year's Cannes, a whisker away from the finish line, has just roared back into blazing, angry life," wrote the Guardian's battle-weary reporter. It was wildly entertaining, full of suspense and hauled from the darkest backblocks of human experience, as anyone might expect from the director of Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers.

More specifically and disturbingly, it was about a crisply authoritative female CEO called Michele – played by Huppert – who is raped by a man who bursts into her front window wearing a balaclava. And this was a comedy; at least, there are a lot of funny things in it. We see that rape scene repeatedly as it replays in her head. There is nothing funny about it, as Verhoeven emphasises in his Cannes interviews. "It's not a rape comedy at all," he tells one reporter. "It's rape and there is comedy. You're not laughing at all when she gets raped."

Be that as it may, Michele's reaction to being raped certainly doesn't follow any recommended guidelines.  First she clears away some china broken in the struggle. Then she has a disturbingly bloody bath. She doesn't call the police or, for that matter, a helpline. Later, she relates the episode at a dinner party. "I suppose I was raped," she says breezily. It should be mentioned that Michele owns a video gaming company that puts out a good deal of product involving busty heroines and priapic aliens with intrusive tentacles. "The orgasmic convulsions are way too timid!" she tells one of her artists, watching a monster defile a digital princess. She might have been overpowered on her own rug, but she never loses control.

Despite the triumphant screening and golden reviews, Verhoeven was gleefully anticipating rage at his new film. It had already raised a few femo-hackles. Elle is adapted from a French-language novel called Oh… by a French-Armenian writer, Philippe Djian. Verhoeven had wanted to make it in the United States, relocating the action to Seattle, with a marquee star. He sent out the script to his selection of "A-list actresses" – but they all came back to him with an immediate refusal. "No American actress would take on such an amoral movie," he says with some relish. "We started to realise this kind of story without a revenge was not for the American market."

Whatever bothered them, however, wasn't bothering Huppert. She had been a Verhoeven fan since she was "very young" – how young, one squirms to think – and saw his Dutch-language erotic drama about a sculptor and his model called Turkish Delight (1973). "I was completely overwhelmed; I thought it was such a great film," she says. "Very Verhoevian already." She draws a thread between that film and Elle; both ostensibly wallow in perversity that she sees as a conduit to emotional intensity. "He gives access to someone's behaviour, the most unconfessable aspects of one's psyche," she says. "That is always moving, you know, to go into someone's inner thoughts. And that was already present in his Dutch films."

There is a difficulty, surely, with showing a woman accepting rape as a life event. "But I immediately understood that that is not the central topic of the film," says Huppert. "There are so many other stories around that one, so many other things to do with violence in the movie. Of course the rape is the central point of this violence but family violence, heredity, transmission between generations, the relationships in the family, professional relationships, friendship, love relationships. The movie is very complex."

Part of that complexity lies in Huppert's own characterisation, which she says Verhoeven left her free to develop in performance.  "As is her custom, the actress nails one peppery, passive-aggressive line reading after another, but it's the magnified physicality of her work that mesmerises most," wrote Variety critic Guy Lodge after the first screening. "Every minute curl of the lip or flick of a fingernail is loaded with implication." She had first chased the role when she heard he was planning to adapt the novel; Verhoeven was just happy she was still interested when he returned, chastened and ready to translate David Birke's script back into French. "But it was only while I was working with her," he says, "that I saw she was bringing something to the movie that I had no idea existed."

Nobody who has followed Huppert's work with even casual interest could fail at this point to recall Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher, in which she plays a sadistically strict Viennese instructor who finds a momentary retreat from herself in the dark booths of the city's many live-sex shows. Is there some shadowy territory she repeatedly feels driven to investigate?

"Well, I don't want to sound cynical, but the sorts of emotions you go through as an actor are so different from the emotions you go through as a spectator. I know it because I am an actor but a spectator too," she says. The atmosphere on the set was light; the very fact of working is inherently  pleasurable for her. "I don't feel anything, I don't prepare: I just do it. It's very easy for me and I have no emotions doing it. Doing movies, it's about the present time:  you do it as you do it, you know. Cinema is this strange thing: it really is happening moment by moment. And I was completely immersed in each frame, so it was wonderful."

At the same time, her improvised responses constantly surprised Verhoeven. There is a crucial moment when she tells her neighbour the story of her beloved father, a serial killer of children. "Pas mal, eh?" she adds jovially as she finishes the story, slapping the man's knee: that is an Huppert original. Michele's father was a monster, her character says cheerfully. Are her own strange appetites her inheritance, or were they inculcated when she helped him burn the evidence of his crimes?  Or is it pointless to look for causes? Perhaps she is as morally inert as her cat.

"I had the feeling that the movie should work with gaps, that there were things I would not tell, things I would leave to the audience," says Verhoeven. Huppert calls Michele "the perfect role, because it doesn't really give clues to her behaviour.  She is never predictable, but she also never gives explanations for what she has done once she has done it." She doesn't feel any need to explain it either. Just going there is astonishing enough.

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