François Ozon's last three films, Water Drops on Burning Rocks, Under the Sand, and the new 8 Women, have made him a sensation in his native France. These wildly disparate tales--a bizarre love quadrangle (part bedroom farce, part sitting-room drama) based on an unproduced play by Fassbinder, a ponderous psychodrama about a middle-aged woman who can't accept her husband's death, and a postmodern theatrical whodunit that taps a rich vein of classicism--are united by their creator's visual stylishness, mordant humor, and a curiously involving sense of distance.

8 Women must be the apex of Ozon's arm's-length oeuvre, if only because it is so self-aware that its very awareness becomes reflexive. The story, taken from an Agatha Christie-esque stage chestnut, couldn't be much more generic; when the patriarch of a large family is discovered facedown in bed with a knife in his back, his wife, daughters, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, sister, and two maids face off to find out who did the deed.

But the plot, which takes many twists, both predictable and un-, is really little more than an excuse to trap six grandes dames and two ingénues in a big, beautiful house, and let the games begin. The cast--Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Béart, Firmine Richard, Virginie Ledoyen, and Ludivine Sagnier--represents an orgy of iconography, and Ozon treats each actress like a treasure (every woman gets her own song to sing, for example) while cagily manipulating their various personas to tell a story that is as much about the art of acting as it is about the art of murder.

I interviewed Ozon, who is 34 and fresh-faced as a chipmunk, at the Four Seasons Hotel.

From Darrieux to Deneuve to Ledoyen, you seem to have nearly every French actress four generations of American audiences have heard of. Can we discuss the iconography of 8 Women?

I wanted first to make a film about women, and after I started working on the script, I realized that I wanted to make a film about actresses, too. For me as a director, "woman" and "actress" are often the same thing. So I made a list of my dream cast, and because of the success of Under the Sand, the eight I wanted to ask all accepted.

Suddenly, my dreams became a reality. I thought maybe one or two would say yes, but not the eight. So suddenly, I had to rewrite my script. It was an opportunity for me to say different things about their careers, and their connections to all moving pictures. I don't know if you American people can read all these connections, but for me it was an opportunity to tell the history of French cinema.

Were any of the older women reluctant to tamper with their images?

I think they are very clever.... Actresses can take more of that than men, very often. They had all seen Under the Sand, so they knew me and they knew what I wanted to make, and I didn't lie to them. I said it would be a film about the characters they were going to play, but about them, too, as actresses. And they said okay. It was not easy every day to deal with that, but they accepted.

I think during the shooting, they forgot--when they play a part, they play a part. When they saw the finished film, they realized all the different meanings that they knew about at the beginning. It was perverse for me. But it was good for them, too. The film was very successful [in France]. Many of [the actresses] had been--not forgotten, but their recent films didn't do very well. Suddenly, they are at the center of the French cinema again.

You've spoken about your desire to make films with distance and detachment, which is the opposite of what most filmmakers, particularly French ones, seem to want.

With this film, it was special, because the story comes from a play, and I didn't want to lie about the origin. Because it was an artificial film, about actresses and characters, I wanted the audience to never forget they were in front of a film.

My problem with "reality" in film is that it is also a manipulation. There are many choices in mise en scène, all the time. I think, when I make an artificial movie, I say to the audience, "It's fake, and I'm beginning the manipulation." As a result, the audience is more and more able to be adult in front of images--because you are used to seeing images all the time, you can project them onto anything.