This interview was originally conducted in March during Film at Lincoln Center’s Rendezvous with French Cinema program.
This year, Juliette Binoche pulls double duty in Film at Lincoln Center’s Rendezvous with French Cinema program, leading a pair of selections as women with only the most tenuous connection to one another. In Claire Denis’ latest feature, “Both Sides Of The Blade,” Binoche forms one point in a charged love triangle with her ex-husband (Grégoire Colin) and her new man (Vincent Lindon), a rugged rugby pro just on the other side of a prison sentence. Desirous and prickly, Sara is a fully-formed, flawed person credibly brought to life by Binoche’s underplayed performance. In “Between Two Worlds,” she transports that empathy and passion into the role of Marianne, a journalist investigating the financial precarity of gig workers by going undercover on the poverty line. While posing as a day-shift maid, she makes a few friends and gets a taste of the bullshit minimum-wagers deal with on a daily basis, but she’ll be made to face up to the ethical snags of her deceptive technique when the time comes to publish.
The commonality between both characters is their combination of naked humanity (often literally, in the case of the Denis) and traits that generate friction — impulsiveness, indecision, solipsism. If they frustrate us, that’s only because we recognize a discomfiting amount of ourselves in their imperfect decision-making. Binoche keeps these women tethered to a foundation of mortal accessibility without shying away or compromising on their more alienating aspects. It’s been the chief constant through an illustrious career that’s paired her with just about every titan of arthouse cinema to cross a festival awards stage in the past thirty years: Leos Carax, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Chantal Akerman, Michael Haneke, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, the list goes on and on. It feels like there’s nothing she can’t do, in part because it also feels like she’s done it all.
The morning after the U.S. debut of “Both Sides Of The Blade” at Lincoln Center, Binoche sat down with The Playlist to discuss her one-two punch of new films, her stance on sex after forty, and her characters’ unfortunate habit of dropping their phone in the toilet. Within a minute or two, it becomes obvious why she’s a movie star; she speaks slowly yet purposefully. She makes you lean in.
“Both Sides Of The Blade” is your third film with Claire Denis. What’s your working relationship like? What do you talk about when you’re on set?
We’re more in the scene than talking about the scene. It’s not an intellectual approach, it’s more physical. With Claire, we don’t go into this formal way of working. She’ll consider the way I’m dressed, the way I’m walking. She likes to be seduced by the characters, into liking them. And so she sees my coat, my hair, and bit by bit, she relates it all to how she’ll film me. It’s more of a visual approach. She trusts the actor’s soul, that we’ll give it at the moment of shooting.
She talks about her actors in very warm terms; I assume there has to be a lot of trust there.
You’ve got to create the magic of films. It can’t just be grabbed; it must be created. It comes down to this sort of relationship, and it very much takes place in silence, in looks, in hearing. It’s a place that doesn’t necessarily have words. Sometimes a word will help, as a tool to open a door, because acting is all about bringing out what’s inside. Especially with a film called “Both Sides Of The Blade”! It has to come from within. So there was no need for many conversations about this. Early on, when we worked on “Let the Sunshine In,” she was talking nonstop, and I didn’t understand what she was saying. But she said not to worry, that that was just her stream-of-consciousness. That was a way of letting things out of herself, without getting into “so, what does the role mean?”
What was your first impression of Sara? She’s got a lot of different sides.
Well, there are a lot of scenes in the script that aren’t in the finished film, and some of them were important to my understanding of her. But it doesn’t matter, because you understand other things. You learn to let go, as an actor, which can be painful or it can be okay. When I read the script, what I first thought of was [Ingmar] Bergman, “Scenes from a Marriage.” Which was exciting, of course, because he’s the master. But also dangerous! There’s so much passion, and violence.
But this passion is all dialed back, with the exception of a couple of scenes. How do you reconcile those big feelings with their often very internal presentation?
The balance is all Claire. Finding what’s right, what’s wrong, that’s her craft and responsibility. As an actor, if the violence comes, I open myself up and like a lion, I do it. I’m not controlling, going this way or that. I want to give myself over to it and see what happens. The trust between actor and director is so vital because I want to go as far as I can, and we discover where the scene goes together. I’m also creative, and my body knows things I don’t know. It’s more than instinct, because intuition is as important, if not more.
Watching your performance, I was reminded of something I’ve been told in two interviews before, both with French women: Agnès Varda and Julie Delpy separately said that for women, sex only gets good after age forty.
[Snorts.] No, no. It all depends on who you’re making love with, your partner. Case by case. I don’t think it’s an age thing.
Being American and watching mostly American films, it still feels notable to see such rich sensuality from a woman in middle age. Hollywood actresses are always talking about the dearth of roles for women past this age or that — have you found there’s more opportunity in the French industry?
We have directors that aren’t frightened of this subject, and are willing to explore what it is to be human at all ages. I know this is a topic that women and journalists and a lot of people are thinking about. My next movie has scenes in which I am naked, and the men as well, and it’s not easy, because you don’t want to be exposed. But it depends on what the story says, and if the story requires that, I’m willing to try it. You just need to trust who’s filming you. That’s something you have to build together.
Did you and Vincent Lindon have any preparation for your sex scenes?
No. It’s the day, and you do it!
Like jumping into a cold pool.
Well, a warm pool.
Your other film here at the Rendezvous, “Between Two Worlds,” also focuses on a woman who doesn’t make it easy to decide what you think of her. By the end, she almost seems kind of dislikable, and the movie doesn’t want to exonerate her.
It’s part of the subject. Because she’s not from the same world as the people she’s writing about. And there’s a possibility of someone in this other world being hurt by what she’s done, consciously. Part of what she’s doing is lying, but you can also see it not being a lie, but as a way to really know the truth, to reveal what’s happening to people who don’t know. Change your way of looking. It’s complex, because an artist needs reality. Plenty of writers, they go and ask questions to get information about what they’re writing. But the thing is, if she had said, “I’m a journalist, I want to know about your life,” they would have maybe changed their way of talking, the information she was going to get, and she wanted the experience of it to know what it feels like. The hardship of waking up at four in the morning, walking because you don’t have a car, having no money to eat or pay the bills, she wanted to have that experience.
And I understand this, because I went through it when I did “Lovers on the Bridge.” I didn’t tell the [vagrants] I was living with that I was an actress. There was one who knew, but the others didn’t. I wanted to be one of them, and in order to be able to embody someone living on the street, I have to be legitimate. I can’t learn that from books, or watching films. I want to know what it feels like! it’s true that I was an actress, I could’ve had the money in my pocket if I wanted to, but I went through some risk. I was almost raped in a hotel, very cheap. I had bells in my mind saying, “Oh, this is dangerous.” All this to say that, on both sides, there are different questions. I understand Hélène Lambert’s character Chrystèle, who feels totally betrayed. She believed something, and she opened the door to her home, made a commitment of friendship, and now her friend is another person!
This doesn’t mean that it wasn’t true. Because the journalist who wrote that book is still in contact with some of the people she met, but there’s one she isn’t — the one who felt betrayed, that Chrystèle is based on.
Did you meet her, the writer you’re portraying in the film?
Yes. In France, she’s very well-known. She was a hostage in Iraq for a few months.
Did you try to get a sense of her mannerisms?
No, because Emmanuel [Carrére], who wrote and directed the film, just thought of her as a writer. We were not interested in strictly being Florence Aubenas. She’s a woman, she’s a writer.
You’ve appeared in so many different sorts of films at this point — art movies, sci-fi, the “Godzilla” you did.
Well, I had to impress my son. Give me a little bit of space to impress my son! He liked it.
Is there anything you feel like you haven’t done that you’d still like to try?
I don’t think that way. I’m always surprised by life. I don’t project anything like that.
I also saw you’re playing Coco Chanel in an Apple TV series coming up. She’s a known personality, how do you start to approach a role where everyone’s got pre-established expectations about your character?
I don’t know yet! That’s part of the work. The approach has to be specific. I have the first two scripts in my computer. So I’m still figuring it out.
Based on how you talk about working with Mme. Denis, it sounds like the character won’t take shape for you until you’re doing it.
Well, that depends on the project. There’s no one way of preparing, no one process. It’s different every time.
One last thing: in “Both Sides Of The Blade,” your character has a pivotal moment when she drops her phone in a bathtub, and in “Between Two Worlds,” you drop it in a toilet. What does it all mean?
What does it mean? I’ve actually done that in another film as well, in “Jet Lag,” phone in the toilet. This is a part of life now!