Anne Fontaine is one of those stylish French filmmakers who should be starring in her own films.

In fact, she was a dancer and actor before writing and directing a batch of films with strong roles for women.

In Coco Before Chanel, Audrey Tautou​ played fashion designer Coco Chanel. And in Adoration, the provocative romantic drama she shot in Australia, Naomi Watts and Robin Wright were two best friends who had affairs with each other's 17-year-old sons.

So while Fontaine is big on working with acclaimed actresses, there was one she had no intention of casting in the romantic romp Gemma Bovery – Gemma Arterton, who broke through as a Bond girl in Quantum of Solace before starring in Prince of Persia and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.

Yes, she suited the character of a beautiful young English woman who becomes the object of fevered male desire when she moves to a postcard village in Normandy, France.

But the film Fontaine was making was based on a graphic novel by English cartoonist and writer Posy Simmonds. And Arterton had already starred in another romantic romp based on a graphic novel by Simmonds – Tamara Drewe.

So casting one Gemma as another was out of the question.

But that all changed after Fontaine had lunch with celebrated French actress Isabelle Huppert​, who played a chic art expert who falls for a boozy unemployed ex-con in her 2011 comedy My Worst Nightmare.

"Isabelle asked me, 'Who's going to play in your new movie?'," she says. "I said, 'Oh my god, I haven't met anybody that excites me. But there is, of course, Gemma Arterton.

"She said, 'It's funny you say that. One week ago, I was at the Marrakech film festival and I met her'."

Huppert was struck by Arterton doing an impression of what it was like when she arrived in the city and men everywhere were looking at her.

So Fontaine decided to meet her.

"She had written a little text to say in French so I could see her accent," the writer-director says. "She was so graceful, so sensual, that I couldn't resist. In one minute I knew she was the best."

While Arterton's French did not extend much further than "bonjour" and "au revoir", she was prepared to spend three months in France to learn more.

So she won the role she was never meant to get.

Fontaine says she was intrigued by the idea of filming the graphic novel because of the way it played with the Gustave Flaubert's​ classic French novel Madame Bovary​.

But it was not the character of Gemma that appealed but the baker, Martin Joubert​, played by Fabrice Luchini​, a Flaubert expert who sees her behaviour heading in a dangerous direction that parallels the novel.

When her marriage to British expat Charlie Bovery (Jason Flemyng​) break downs, she catches the eye of a dashing young aristocrat (Niels Schneider​).

Joubert, who has a thing for Gemma himself, tries to intervene.

"I saw that the main character was so close to being a director – the way he projects his imagination on a character," Fontaine says. "You think you are going to influence the destiny of characters."

She saw the character as a kind of "French Woody Allen" with a vivid imagination when it came to romance. There was also humour in the graphic novel in the relationship between the English and the French in Normandy.

While Madame Bovary is well known in France – the book is still taught in school – Fontaine says the film's audience does not need to be familiar with the novel

"Even if you've never heard about her, you can catch that this character is going to die one day, that she has [romances] with many men and that she's a woman who is unsatisfied. But if you've read it, you can watch it on another level."

After Gemma Bovery, Fontaine headed to Poland to shoot a very different film – the drama Agnus  Dei, about a young French Red Cross worker who discovers a convent where seven nuns are pregnant at the end of World War II.

"It's an amazing story – very powerful, very moving – about faith, birth and spirituality," she says.

Gemma Bovery is out now.