MACAO, CHINA – “If you’re too much in the head, if you decide things, it cuts you off – because acting is not about thinking,” Juliette Binoche declared. “It’s about giving, giving all the layers inside you.”
The renowned French actress made several such proclamations during her moderated conversation at the International Film Festival and Awards, Macao, which she was also attending to promote her new film “The Truth,” directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda – one of several legendary directors Binoche touched on during her hour-long chat with moderator Mike Goodridge and director Diao Yinan.
“The Truth,” which opened the Venice Film Festival, is a fascinating piece of international collaboration: a Japanese-speaking director making a very French film, in that language and very much in that country’s cinematic tradition, with two of its iconic actors (Binoche and Catherine Deneuve). But Binoche had wanted to work with Kore-eda since meeting him at Cannes years ago, and found the collaboration, despite the language barrier, to be inspiring. “He let us do what we felt, because of the language,” she explained. “He didn’t understand French, but he knew what he wrote. He was trustful.”
It only makes sense that Binoche would work with Kore-eda, however – since the beginning of her career, she’s found herself framed by the medium’s greatest directors. You can trace it back to her earliest days, when Jean-Luc Godard plucked her from a cashier’s job, put her through five screen tests, and finally cast her in his 1985 film “Hail, Mary,” much to the chagrin of her boss: “She was trying to convince me I should stay as a cashier because I can grow and become important in the shop.”
But Binoche learned much from the French New Wave legend. “He would shoot whenever he wanted to,” she recalled. “So sometimes we would go on the set and not shoot, because they decided no, he was not ready. But it was informative for me that, you know, making a scene has to come from a very personal and deep place. It’s not just a machine that goes on for him; it was really something you have to capture, with a reality and these feelings.”
Thus began a career marked by not only by international acclaim and awards, but idiosyncrasies. After winning the Oscar for “The English Patient,” she said, “I almost felt guilty of success,” and resisted the urge to capitalize directly on that award: “If I had moved to America to make it, I think I would have got into the system. And the system, for me, is frightening – because then you have to fit in the system.” So she went in a different direction. “I was trying to put myself a little smaller. So I went back home and I did French films, mostly.”
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Yet even when returning home and regrouping, she could not resist the urge to work all over the world. “Curious is the basis of human beings anyway,” she explained, and the globe-trotting she’s done throughout her career came naturally. “I don’t know whether it’s because I went to boarding schools, but I have the feeling of community very easily.” And that ease leads her to throw herself into new environments and collaborations. “I think it’s the passion that takes me,” she says. “It’s the passion of learning and the connections and great artists.”
Some of those great artists have included her “Certified Copy” director Abbas Kiarostami (“We had a lot of fun with Abbas. We laughed a lot”), her “Mauvis Sang” and “Lovers on the Bridge” director Leos Carax (I said to Leos, you know, I don’t want to be an image, a beautiful image; I want to be a real person. So while he was writing, because we were living together, I pushed him”), and her “Three Colors: Blue” director Krzysztof Kieslowski, whom she pushed to rehearse more. “He was trained as a Polish director with no money, so [he’d only shoot] only one take because film is so expensive,” she laughed. “So I said, ‘You’re in France, you can have two takes, the producer won’t be angry with you!’”
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Throughout this conversation about her long-lasting and continent-spanning career, Binoche conveyed a combination of restlessness and eagerness – a refusal to ever consider her journey as an actor, and the education therein, complete. “I don’t think you can ever say, ‘I’ve made it,’” she explained. “I think as a human being, you’re always on the move, you’re always in transformation. You can say okay, this I really put my heart into, I really gave myself, I went through something that I’d never done before. Or I really had an amazing encounter with this person or that person. But to achieve is so abstract because it’s giving. Acting, or any art, is some kind of force that goes through you.”
So what does she look for – what is the spark that keeps her going? “In the moment of silence in front of the camera, there’s some kind of magic that needs to happen,” she said. “Of course, you know, it takes where you’ve gone, knowing the marks and all you’ve been working on, whether it’s the accent or whether it’s the period of time that you’ve done all the research and everything, you know your lines. But it’s all behind you. At the moment, you’re jumping into the moment, and it has to be like you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
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But this is also an actor who often works with directors who have a pronounced and dominating voice, or as a part of large ensembles, or even, occasionally, in a giant blockbuster. So, she was asked, how do you find your place in the film? “I am the film,” she replied simply. “So I’m not trying to find a place… When I come on the set, I am already full or totally empty, you know, there’s a back and forth feeling of being ready and not at all ready. It’s really this kind of equilibrium, that you’re on the edge of yourself somewhere. And it’s like a loving moment. There’s something about finding this secret, loving place that you’re going to be able to share.
“That’s why I love shooting still, and am passionate about it,” Binoche continued, “because it’s something very sensual, physical, and yet totally spiritual. And for me, that’s the encounter of growth, that makes it like breathing and witnessing that with others and sharing it with the crew and the director and the DP and everyone, it’s… it’s just bliss.”
