Marie-Noëlle Baroni is telling me how important it is to win the trust of her animals when two unexpected visitors join us in her bizarre but cosy home – a former refrigerated lorry container in the south of France. First, a fawn peers through the door and hesitantly walks in. This is Bambou – found in the forest a few months ago and brought to Baroni, who fed him with a baby’s bottle.

Bambou is followed by Ratus, a raccoon who zigzags around, making a craaw-craaw noise. “He’s crying – he doesn’t want to go to bed on his own,” Baroni translates. To my amazement, Ratus shuffles up to the fawn, stands up on his hind legs and gives him a hug around the neck, as well as a cross between a snuffle and a kiss. “He wants Bambou to put him to bed,” Baroni exclaims delightedly.

A lively, fast-talking and birdlike blonde, she lives at the centre of a DIY private zoo created on 10 acres in the countryside. “We live penned in with animals. I can always see them from the windows and they can see me,” says Baroni, 42, who is married with six grown-up children. The stars of her vast menagerie in St-Rémy-de-Provence are half a dozen foxes that feature in a new film called The Fox and the Child, made by Luc Jacquet, who directed the worldwide hit March of the Penguins.

It is a touching, fable-like story about a girl who befriends a fox and features a voiceover by Kate Winslet. In the film, the young heroine, played by Bertille Noël-Bruneau, sees her first fox and decides to track it down and tame it. It leads her into a secret world of mountain peaks, forests and a cavern, where dangers include a bear and a lynx. The film should shake all those who consider foxes vermin.

Baroni has lived alongside animals for as long as she can remember. A beekeeper’s daughter who was brought up near a forest, she was only eight when she first took in wild animals – a pair of dormice that she nursed in her room (and that then ate up the insulation in the walls). Her first fox, a cub, was given to her by a hunter who had shot its mother.

“Domestic animals first,” she says when I ask her to list her menagerie: two cows, five pigs, three horses, one pony, two donkeys, 15 sheep and goats, chickens, geese, ducks, doves and pigeons, two peacocks, a parrot, budgies, crows, a buzzard, boars, rabbits, mice, rats, gerbils, a ferret, a raccoon, a marmot, a buck, a roe deer, chinchillas, a hedgehog, cats and dogs. The foxes, though, are closest to her heart. She tells me to wait inside their enclosure and walks up to a fox sleeping on a shelf.

“Bonjour, Ziza,” she says cheerfully. “Come on, wake up and come and say hello.” Ziza doesn’t protest when she leans close to her face, strokes her and then brings her to me. I am being stared at by two expressive honey-coloured eyes that convey regret at being disturbed and only a flicker of interest. She nuzzles Baroni’s neck. “It’s all about trust,” Baroni explains. “Ziza saw me talking to you so she knows you’re not dangerous. She trusts me not to put her in danger.”

A pair of lynxes in the next-door pen are growling hoarsely as they pace around, also upset at being woken up. Baroni tries unsuccessfully to bring them to me. “Better not take any risks,” she concludes.

Back in her container home – converted by her husband, Fred, 35, who runs an earth-moving firm – she explains that Ziza is the daughter of Titus, the film’s four-legged hero. During a year of filming in the Jura mountains in France and the Abruzzo region in Italy, he proved the ideal fox actor, despite being 12 – a venerable age for a such a creature.

“Titus was exceptional because he was generous. He liked contact with humans and he was always willing to try new things. The script could have been written for him,” says Baroni, who trains her foxes by playing games with them. Like any Alist celebrity, Titus could be moody: “Foxes are a bit like divas – you can’t force them to do something they don’t want to do. They’re wild animals – you can’t cheat with them.”

However, there was always a reason for Titus being in a bad mood – he may have been tired or perhaps the day was too hot. And in any case, Baroni’s other foxes were often used as stand-ins when Titus was out of sorts or if a scene was too dangerous for an old fox.

The hardest sequence to capture, Baroni recalls, was of a lynx (played by Youk, one of her irritated lynxes whose sleep we disturbed) chasing Ziza. It lasts only a few breath-stopping minutes, but took 2½ months to shoot: “We were filming in the snow, which means every time you leave tracks you have to wait for more snow to fall, or you have to move.” Baroni refuses to reveal how the scene was done, but says no technical wizardry was involved. The crew often had no alternative but to be patient. “Say we’d been working

on a scene with three cameras. If we needed a fourth camera, it could take anything from two hours to three days for the fox to get used to that new camera.” Many parts of the film were pure improvisation by the foxes, such as a scene prompted by the discovery that they are fascinated by crocuses in the springtime.

The film’s bedrock is the relationship that developed between Titus and Noël- Bruneau. To get the relationship between the two on a good footing, Baroni started by talking at length to the young actress within Titus’s hearing. “I wanted Titus to get used to her voice and her smell, to see that I was okay with her. It was Titus who came up to her; she stroked him and very quickly they became accomplices. She won his trust. He’d follow her everywhere during filming and vice versa.”

A few months ago, Baroni had to call Noël-Bruneau to say that Titus had died. “Bertille cried, but she was prepared.” The actress still visits Baroni up to twice a month and is particularly close to Ziza.

“If you see a fox as a predator,” Baroni says, “all you see is an animal passing in front of your car headlights. We’ve lost the child’s sense of wonder at seeing an ant climbing up a blade of grass to reach a drop of water twinkling in the sunlight. That’s a way of looking that the young and old can have. It’s a joy that costs nothing.”

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