JULIETTE BINOCHE: INTERVIEW
Time Out
ure/5589/juliette-binoche-interview.html
Sept 4 2008
UK
The great French actress, Juliette Binoche, has come to London to work
with ace choreographer Akram Khan while the two-month Binoche season
and exhibition gets under way at the BFI Southbank. She discusses
film and painting with Dave Calhoun
Anyone at this week’s Venice film festival drawn to Abbas Kiarostami’s
new film solely by the presence of Juliette Binoche’s name on the
credits – and not by this bold Iranian filmmaker’s reputation – may
be bemused by what they see, especially if they only know this French
actress from her more mainstream work, such as Anthony Minghella’s
‘The English Patient’ or Lasse Hallstrom’s ‘Chocolat’.
Binoche appears in Kiarostami’s experimental ‘Shirin’ – but only
for a minute. She’s one of many women’s faces we watch for a full 90
minutes as they sit in a cinema viewing an epic film about a tragic,
female Armenian folk hero. We never see the film they watch; we only
hear its dialogue and observe the women’s tearful reactions.
‘Yes, it took me about 15 minutes to film,’ Binoche laughs. ‘Abbas
was making the film in his basement, I went along to help. Next year,
I’m going to make another film with him, a full film that we’re going
to shoot in Italy.’
Her new film with Kiarostami may sound strange for an actress who can
command leading roles in France, but it’s typical of Binoche, who has
a habit of seeking out filmmakers from across globe – improvising for
Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s ‘Flight of the Red Balloon’, as the grieving sibling
in Olivier Assayas’s ‘Summer Hours’ or playing the love interest to
Steve Carell in Peter Hedges’ comedy ‘Dan in Real Life’.
In France, her image is hardly ever off screens. Now it’s the turn
of Londoners to find Binoche hard to avoid. From next week, she will
be appearing at the National Theatre in a dance performance piece,
‘in-i’, that she and the British dancer Akram Khan have been devising
for much of this past year. At the same time, across the road from
the National, the BFI Southbank will be celebrating Binoche with a
six-week retrospective of her work with such varied filmmakers as
Leos Carax, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Michael Haneke. And that’s not
all. Visitors to the BFI will also find an exhibition of Binoche’s
paintings in the venue’s gallery.
That’s Juliette Binoche: actress, dancer, painter. Although
the word she would most probably choose to describe herself is
‘collaborator’. ‘I’m nobody’s puppet,’ she tells me, before accepting
that if there’s one director she might just – just – be willing to
submit to once in a while, it’s to Haneke, the Austrian filmmaker
with whom she made ‘Code Unknown’ and ‘Hidden’. ‘He’s the exception,
I’ll go on his road because it’s very specific and he’s like a very
precise painter, almost maniac in his way of working.’ More and more,
though, she wants to work as close as possible with filmmakers,
‘to be involved in the planning, the whole process.’
Right now, her talk is of her latest collaboration: the dance piece
that she has devised from scratch with Khan. We meet on the South Bank,
where she’s in the final stages of rehearsals. How did this venture
come about? ‘When I was making "Breaking and Entering" in London,
I had a masseuse, Su-Man, who asked me if I wanted to dance,’ she
explains. It turns out that Su-Man is married to Khan’s producer. ‘I
said yes, and I was invited to "Zero Degree", a piece that Akram was
performing, and at the end Su-Man asked me if I wanted to go in a
studio for three days with Akram.’
At 44, she had never danced in her life. She admits that rehearsals
have involved a lot of pain. ‘I think it’s going to help me deal with
death, actually,’ she says, before laughing at the very thought. It’s
been intense. ‘It’s been like having to climb mountains.’
We talk a little about the retrospective, which she considers ‘like
an exhibition of paintings, you know? It’s a way to revisit and to
make links.’ In her mind, she’s close to all her films, right back to
her first proper role in Godard’s ‘Je vous salue, Marie’ in 1985. I
ask which were the pivotal ones. To Godard, she credits becoming
‘aware that the director is not your father, that he’s not going to
save your life.’ To André Techiné and ‘Rendez-vous’, her first lead
role, also in 1985, she attributes her first experience of having
‘the whole film on my shoulders somehow’.
Working with Kieslowski on the ‘Three Colours’ trilogy was ‘so
easy, we’d shoot so quickly, it was a joy’, and through Leos Carax
she ‘discovered movies; I knew about theatre but not much about
movies.’ Finally, she says working with Minghella was ‘like telepathy’.
Binoche will also be exhibiting seven paintings of the directors with
whom she’s worked, commissioned by the editor of the magazine Cahiers
du Cinema. ‘He asked me to do it, but I was shooting five films and
had no time. I would have had to spend all my weekends doing these
portraits, and in the end, that’s exactly what happened.’
Will she continue to paint directors? Has it become a habit, I
wonder? ‘I try not to have too many habits!’ she says, breaking out
into a huge rolling laugh.
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