Miscellaneous

Emotional intelligence

Source: Sunday Herald - January 8, 2006

By James Mottram

Fiercely private, flawlessly beautiful and famed for inhabiting her characters completely in both French and English-speaking films, Juliette Binoche believes in graft over glamour. The quintessential Gallic actress talks to James Mottram about her past roles, her forthcoming films and life as an indefinable Hollywood star

Strolling into the French Riviera hotel suite, Juliette Binoche arrives for our interview dressed for business in a black trouser suit and heels. Entirely co-ordinated to match her deep brown eyes and shoulder-length dark hair, it’s an elegant but modest dress code – but one entirely apt for the actress the French media simply call ‘La Binoche’. Now 41, it’s 20 years since she made her breakthrough in André Téchiné’s erotic drama Rendez-vous but she has aged remarkably well. “I’m not obsessed by looks,” she says, “I think you can become a prisoner of your own image.” In possession of an effortless beauty, while she may no longer be the face Lancôme reputedly paid $1 million a year to advertise their perfume Poême, it hardly matters. That the spray’s name is a pun on “peau-aime”, with the suggestion of “lovely skin”, becomes clear when you meet her. If there’s one word to describe her, it’s flawless.

Yet Binoche is not an actress entranced by the superficial elements of her profession, for acting to her is about graft rather than glamour. One who internalises her characters until their emotions literally seep from her pores – as demonstrated by her definitive role as a woman grief-stricken from the simultaneous loss of her daughter and husband in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Blue – Binoche is a performer who conveys pain like few others. Not that it comes without some cost to her. “I never felt being an actor or making a movie was an easy thing to do,” she says. “I’ve never seen it as something entertaining and easy. For me, it requires effort, dedication, inspiration, love – with your mind, your feet, your arms, everything in your possession, and out of your possession sometimes. You have to just have faith that it’s going to work. I don’t think I’ve ever been on an easy film, like a commercial film – which would be very difficult for me.”

This month sees the release of two films starring Binoche that express the dual nature of her career. Michael Haneke’s Hidden is the most critically revered movie of the last 12 months. Winner of three prizes in Cannes, including Best Director for the Austrian Haneke, the film was voted Best European Film at the recent European Film Awards with Binoche’s co-star Daniel Auteuil claiming the acting honours. Meanwhile, the US-set Bee Season, which casts Binoche opposite Richard Gere, is another example of the difficulty she has had with English-language projects before and after she won an Oscar for The English Patient in 1997.

That night, elated at being awarded Best Supporting Actress when everyone roundly expected Lauren Bacall to win for The Mirror Has Two Faces, she stammered to the world, “It’s like a dream. It must be a French dream!” And certainly her role as the nurse in Anthony Minghella’s sweeping epic felt like a hallucination next to the troubled reality of her other non-French roles. In 1992, she went from playing a stiff Cathy to Ralph Fiennes’ Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights to a woman who cheats on her fiancé with his father (played by Jeremy Irons) in Louis Malle’s Damage. The latter was particularly problematic, notably when she fell out with Irons after he reputedly stuck his tongue in her mouth during one of the numerous violent love scenes. “Sometimes in life things are not easy, and it changes you,” she says, rather elusively, of her time on the film.

This decade she veered from the sickly confection Chocolat (2000) to the laboured Country Of My Skull, the South African-set story of the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings that remains unreleased in the UK two years after premiering at the Berlin Film Festival. Only her bookish rural Czech girl, Tereza, back in her 1988 English debut The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, has gone any way to indicate her innate talent. Binoche admits acting in another language is not her forte. “When I don’t think about it, it’s okay. When I think about, it’s not so. Some specific words come more to me in English, and it’s very confusing. I remember when I was working in English all the time, and I had to do an interview with Elle magazine, and I couldn’t make a sentence. I was caught in the middle, not knowing which way to go.”

One can rather imagine Binoche feeling the same when it comes to sifting through scripts from her homeland and abroad. Bee Season is one such project that might have been better left untouched. Adapted from the novel by Myla Goldberg by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal (mother to actor siblings Jake and Maggie), it’s a muddled attempt to draw comparisons with the mystical cult religion of Kabbalah and, of all things, spelling. Giving a full-blooded performance that deserves a better film, Binoche plays Miriam, a wife and mother-of-two on the verge of emotional collapse. As her Jewish husband scholar (played by Gere) becomes obsessed with their youngest child’s success in the National Spelling Bee, Miriam quietly implodes. “It was an interesting part,” says Binoche. “She’s covering up everything, but there’s a lot going on underneath.”

With the film helmed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, this was the first time Binoche has ever been co-directed. “I was wondering how it was going to be, because I’ve never had this experience before,” she says. “I was wondering who am I supposed to talk to! I said that to this one but now I have to say it to that one!” She calls them “like brothers”, though she admits she first thought they were lovers. “I thought something was going on, but it wasn’t! One’s straight – and straight is such a strange expression in English – and one’s homosexual!” It’s at this point that Binoche, throwing her head back, lets out that earthy chuckle of hers. “She’s got an amazing laugh. One of the great laughs of our modern times,” admits McGehee. “It might be the greatest laugh I’ve ever heard,” adds Siegel. “It’s so deep and real.”

Calling her both “serious-minded” and “gregarious”, they both admit that Binoche warmed to them only after the shoot finished. “There was a subdued thing that she stayed in a little bit over the course of making the movie,” says McGehee. “She is a very psychologically based actress in her preparation. She is very thorough, and she really digs deep into what motivates her character and why.” In other words, once she’s working, she inhabits the emotional landscape of her characters – which, given her choice of roles, is no doubt why she can be seen to be detached and reserved.

“I think the characters I play go through tunnels, like in Three Colours: Blue, for example, where she’s lost everything,” Binoche says. “In The English Patient, she loses her best friend; this patient is dying in front of her – there’s no hope, so she’s going to start from the bottom. In films we see extremes, because it’s where you have turning points. Before I thought there was a common denominator between my films – as if all my characters were sisters – but I’m not so sure now.”

That said, Binoche can certainly see why she chose her other new film, Hidden. Set in contemporary Paris, she and Auteuil play a suburban middle-class couple who begin to receive anonymous packages containing videotape footage of their house. Who is sending them and why is the core of what is a deeply disconcerting film that deftly tackles its heavyweight socio-political themes. The last time Binoche worked with Haneke was five years ago on Code Unknown. Another Parisian-set drama dealing with xenophobia and victimisation, it saw Binoche – who played an actress – deliver one of the most powerful scenes of her career as she crumbles to tears after two Arab teenagers verbally abuse her on the subway. “What I love about Michael is that he has a specific vision,” says Binoche. “Instead of doing charcoal, you’re doing oil painting and then drawing. It’s the same purpose somehow for an actress, but with a different vision.”

In Hidden, which references the infamous 1961 Massacre of Algerians in Paris, Binoche yet again found her conscience pricked. “The hope for me is to relate to the past today,” she says, “And that for me is the real question of the movie and the real hope of it.” Back in 2002, she attended a screening of a documentary L’Ennemi Intimé by her friend Patrick Rotman, about the French perpetrators working in the military during the Algerian war. Also attended by various journalists, Binoche wound up being invited by a French radio station to travel to Algeria to participate in a series of interviews programmed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the liberation of the country. “We have to go and say, ‘Forgive me, I’m sorry!’ It’s important as French people,” she says. “There’s been so much damage there and it hasn’t been talked about or shared. Not enough anyway.”

I ask her if she sees herself as political. “I would say I’m humanly engaged,” she replies, an answer that comes as no surprise given her background. An only child whose parents – theatre director Jean-Marie Binoche and actress Monique Stalens – divorced when she was four, Binoche was raised with a conscience. When I previously met her on the set of Country Of My Skull, outside Cape Town, she told me she knew about Apartheid from an early age “because my parents were communists”. “We listened to Belafonte and Makeba singing together when I was a baby, so I know all those songs by heart. That was my favourite record. So I know all these tribal songs, without knowing the meaning of the word, and that’s because I was brought up with this music.”

A headstrong child, Binoche was sent away to a Catholic boarding school after her parents separated, and it was during these early years that she developed her love for acting. “The desire came, first when I was in school, in the courtyard playing with my friends. It was my way to survive school. There was probably something as a child I wanted to express, something unsaid that I needed to share,” she explains. Returning to live with her mother, when she was 15 she attended a specialised arts school in Paris and three years later began to study acting at the National School of Dramatic Art of Paris and the Paris Conservatoire. While she briefly considered a career as an artist, she turned her attentions fully towards her profession when she got an agent through a friend and joined a theatre troupe that toured France, Belgium and Switzerland. Eventually following in her mother’s footsteps, and heading for the stage, she began to take work in film – notably in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1983 controversial retelling of the Virgin Birth, Hail Mary.

While she has had her periods living abroad – be it London or New York – during extended theatre runs, Binoche has always kept a house in Paris. She now lives in the suburbs with her two children – 11-year-old Raphaël from a brief relationship with a professional scuba diver named Andre Halle, and five-year-old Hannah from her time with actor Benoît Magimel, who starred opposite Binoche in 1999’s Les Enfants du Siècle. She has begun to show Raphaël her more family-oriented films – Chocolat and French comedy Jet Lag. “I’m waiting for him to ask to see films. I don’t want to impose it. He sees a lot of different films, but I think because I’m his mother, there’s something different about seeing your mother go through so many stages.” Being a mother evidently occupies what free time Binoche has to the point where she no longer paints as she used to. “My life is too busy,” she shrugs. “Having children, you have to spend time with them, otherwise why would you have them?”

As domesticated as she sounds, Binoche has had her share of on-set romances. She had a long affair with director Leos Carax, whom she met on his 1986 romantic thriller Mauvais Sang. They reunited for Les Amants du Pont-Neuf in 1991 for Binoche to play a role Carax wrote for her, complete with eye-patch and smudged cheeks. In between, she grew intimate on and off screen with Daniel Day-Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being before hooking up with Olivier Martinez, her handsome co-star from The Horseman On The Roof (and now the partner of Kylie Minogue) in 1995. I wonder how she copes with media intrusion into her life. “I’m just living my life and I try to have a normal life,” she says. She stops for a second to process the thought. “‘Normal’ doesn’t mean right to me! I don’t know what’s normal.”

Naturally aloof and a woman who guards her private life with a steely resolve, it’s here that Binoche starts to become a little more truculent as an interviewee. It takes three questions to pin her down on whether she would like her children to enter her profession. After a long, evasive digression about how theatre as a 17-year-old filled her with a burning desire to open up and express herself, she finally answers: “They choose whatever they want to. I don’t know.” As she notes that “the paparazzi is just the outside of something unreal”, it’s hard to imagine opening an edition of Paris Match and finding her kicking back in a photo spread with her children by her side. “Discretion is necessary,” she says, “because we’re so exposed and we talk about very intimate things.”

Binoche recently completed Breaking And Entering in London which reunites her with The English Patient director Anthony Minghella. Starring opposite Jude Law, who plays a landscape architect whose Kings Cross-based offices are repeatedly burgled, Binoche features as a Bosnian named Amira whose path intersects with Law’s character. Binoche’s research took her to Sarajevo to meet with people who had lived through the “terrible war” that tore the city apart.

“Just being there and seeing the damage … even though the city has been rebuilt it’s still very damaged and the hearts are damaged. I talked to a student of the time, and I said, ‘How did you feel when you had to go to school?’ Sometimes he ran and sometimes he didn’t; so I asked him why he didn’t. He said, ‘Well, because I didn’t care. It was too much stress. I’d been running without being shot for many days, so why should I care about today?’ There’s a moment when you have to say, ‘I’ll live my life and see what happens’.”

While the film might finally show audiences what she is capable of in English, sadly this was not the case in Abel Ferrara’s Mary, which made its bow at last year’s Venice Film Festival. Starring as an actress who plays Mary Magdalene in a Passion Of The Christ-like production, it further signals Binoche’s desire to work with maverick directors such as Ferrara, but it’s yet another film where her style looks out of kilter with what’s going on around her. It’s no coincidence that those capable of getting the best out of her – Kieslowski, Carax, Haneke and Téchiné, who reunited with her in 1998 for Alice et Martin – built their films around Binoche rather than simply shoe-horning her in. The question is, does she see herself acting for the rest of her life?

“I don’t know,” she answers, slowly. “I sometimes feel like I could do another job. Anything. Maybe because as an actress you’re playing different characters, everything feels possible. Everything is possible – and life can change” – she clicks her fingers – “like that”.

Hidden and Bee Season are released on January 27

'How did I survive my childhood?'

Source: The Telegraph, December 16, 2005

Juliette Binoche, the most gifted French actress of her generation, talks to Benjamin Secher about her difficult early life, her melancholy moods - and why she turned down Steven Spielberg

'I am full of doubts," says Juliette Binoche, an eerie intensity illuminating her huge, brown eyes. "Each new film is like a trial. Before I step in front of the camera, I do not know whether I am going to fall or whether I am going to fly - and that is exactly the way I want it to stay."

Twenty years after a small role in Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary brought her to the world's attention, the most gifted French actress of her generation remains dedicated to the art of making life difficult. Throughout her career, Binoche has repeatedly been offered a fast track to Hollywood fame and fortune. Each time she has turned it down, preferring an artistic gamble to an easy pay cheque.

Juliette Binoche: 'I am pretty much melancholic'
After her eye-catching English language debut opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), Binoche could have walked straight into any studio in LA and demanded a top-dollar job. Instead, she returned to France, and devoted three years of her fledgling career to Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, an impenetrable cult oddity directed by Leos Carax, a maverick who was, for a while, Binoche's lover.

Two years later, another crack at Anglophone cinema - with both Damage and Wuthering Heights - led to a call from Steven Spielberg, determined to pitch her against the man-eating velociraptors of Jurassic Park. "I would rather play a dinosaur," she said at the time, "than one of the humans in that film." She chose instead the role of a bereaved mother and wife, numb with grief, in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours: Blue - and gave the performance of a lifetime, combining fragility with grit in what would become her trademark style.

Even in 1997, when Binoche became the first French actress to win an Oscar in nearly 40 years, for The English Patient, the inscrutable Parisian shunned convention, absenting herself from the screen altogether in favour of a poorly paid, much admired season on the London stage. "It's never been my purpose to become an American icon, or more famous or richer," she says adamantly. "The work itself is the goal. That's what makes me happy."

It has to be said, perched on a sofa, a cushion hugged tightly to her chest, the diminutive Binoche does not look entirely happy. Something about her serene, almost otherworldly face seems inherently sad, and not only because it is so hard to dissociate her from the tragic figures she has played on screen.

"I think I am pretty much melancholic," she admits. "It's part of my being, I would say. But, at the same time, I am full of joy. You must understand, I don't have to be happy to be happy."

Then, the waters thoroughly muddied, cinema's most engaging enigma does something entirely unexpected. She tilts back her head, opens her mouth and dissolves into peals of shocking, raucous laughter.

It has been five years since Binoche was last seen on British screens, in both Chocolat and Michael Haneke's Code Unknown. That hiatus is about to end, in typically unpredictable style, with two films as different as chalk and cheese. Hidden is a searingly intelligent French thriller that reunites her with Haneke; Bee Season is a glossy US family drama starring Richard Gere. The latter film is a particularly intriguing choice from an actress who has made a habit of rebuffing America's advances.

"For me, habit is just a synonym for death," she says, sharply, unravelling her scarf and tossing it aside. "What I love most about this crazy life is the adventure of it."

Binoche's life so far has, arguably, been crazier than most. She was only four when her parents - a theatre director and an actress - split up and sent their youngest daughter to boarding school.

"Even with the distance of all these years, when I look back at my childhood I think, 'Wow, how did I survive that?'," she says. "But then, it is hard to live - we all know that."

There is a long pause, during which Binoche blinks for what seems like the first time. "We were not really a family at all. We were always separate, always moving around." Her father went to South America, her mother took up teaching in France, and Binoche got to grips with a school that she hated.

"It was horrible," she hisses, "but I think it was probably partly what made me who I am. If you have everything, then you don't want to go on. It's the lacking that makes you search for something better."

That search led Binoche, while still at school, towards the stage. "Choosing to be in the theatre was a way to put my roots down somewhere with other people. It was a way to choose a new family."

At 15, she moved into an apartment with her elder sister in Paris. There, after starring in productions of Molière and Pirandello, she won a place at the prestigious Conservatoire, only to drop out a couple of years later when the film offers started to flood in.

"To tell you the truth," she says, with an insouciant shrug. "I was a little bored at the Conservatoire. Not because of the teachers - I really loved some of them - but the students. They were not behaving like actors responsible for their lives. I was already having to deal with cooking and shopping and making my own life with my sister, and I felt there was no time to lose."

The actress launched herself on a frenetic schedule, accepting almost every film role she was offered and appearing in eight features in only two years.

"It was very difficult for me to say no when I first started out," she says. "To turn down an offer was just unbearably painful. Sometimes I wouldn't even give an answer because I was so frightened of hurting someone. But it was a terrible way to be, and I knew, in the end, I would have to learn to face my 'yes's and my 'no's".

Does she now find it easier to say no? "Yes," she replies, without a flicker of irony, "because I detach myself more. My decisions are less emotional."

Those decisions have led very occasionally to trouble. There was, for example, the time she was sacked by veteran director Claude Berri from the lead of his French Resistance epic Lucie Aubrac. "I probably frightened him," says Binoche, with a pout that can only be described as Gallic. "I knew too much about the subject."

On the whole, however, the actress's impulsive approach to choosing roles has paid off. Looking at her filmography, peppered with the great names of Godard and Malle, Kieslowski and Minghella, you might wonder what she can possibly have left to achieve.

"Achieve?" she asks, with another short burst of incredulous laughter. "What am I meant to achieve? My only ambition is to be true every moment I am living." The emptily grand statement hangs awkwardly in the air. "I also want my children to find their own way in life and," she pauses, "I want to pursue the idea that being in a couple is possible."

At times, Binoche's romantic life has appeared as eclectic as her career. She has been linked with a string of co-stars (including Ralph Fiennes and Olivier Martinez) and has children from two previous relationships.

But she is still looking for her perfect match. "Around this area, for me, it is very hard to compromise," she sighs. "You've got to search without searching and that is what's so difficult."

With no fewer than six features slated for release next year - among them, new films for Abel Ferrara, Jacques Audiard and Anthony Minghella - the 41-year-old Binoche is gearing up for the most prolific patch of her life, at a time when so many of her contemporaries are starting to fade from the limelight.

"Oh, I'll be forgotten too, don't worry," she says. How does that make her feel? "Completely impotent. But it's all part of the process. Being a famous actress may give you a sense of being important, but believe me," she says, a dazzling smile slowly spreading across her face, "it's just an illusion."

Acting is a tough business

Source: Ms London magazine - April 18, 2005 (thanks to Moon)

It’s lunch time on a rainy, early march day in LA and Juliette Binoche, as usual, is turning heads as she walks across the lobby of the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel. In fact, even the most jaded star watchers are sitting up and paying attention, and no wonder. Wearing a chic black jacket over jeans and heels, and with her high, sculpted cheekbones, luminous eyes and cover girl perfect skin, the actress is even more stunning in the flesh than she is on the silver screen.

She looks super fit and credits seeing a pumped up Madonna live in Paris some years ago for “inspiring me to work out, and now I try to do it every day. Acting is a tough business, and you need to be in good shape mentally and physically”.

Over the years, La Binoche, as she is fondly referred to by the French, has proved that she is in excellent shape physically by stripping off and jumping into bed whenever the role demands it, as in sexually explicit films like the Unbearable Lightness of Being and Damage. In fact, the actress shocked many in the latter with the shear ferociousness of her torrid sex scenes with Jeremy Irons, but she has no regrets. “I didn’t want to repeat the same old things you see with sex scenes in so many films”, she explains sweetly. “For me, it could not be nice, warm sexual relationship, it had to be very intense. Very, very animal.”

She jumps into bed once again in her new film, In My Country, this time as an adulterous wife cheating with Samuel L Jackson. But the film isn’t about illicit sex and it wasn’t her body that got her the role. It was because, as director John Boorman points out, the sexy French actress is in a league of her own when it comes down to being “emotionally naked. She has this gift that very few actresses have, which is why I cast her”.

Indeed, many of Hollywood’s top actresses were eager to be in the film, including Charlize Theron, but Binoche beat them all to the punch. Mention this and she squirms in her chair and looks distinctly uncomfortable. “I don’t like to say beat”, she protests. “I find that to be very cruel. As an actress we don’t beat one another. It’s whoever’s right for the part.”

It’s a measure of Boorman’s respect for Binoche’s gifts that she was his first choice to play Anna Malan, the beautiful but troubled Afrikaner heroine of his new film, despite the fact that oscar winner Theron is in reality Afrikaner with the right accent and pedigree for the role. “It’s not an easy part, and not an easy story to tell,” says Boorman but “Juliette made it her own”.

A harrowing story set against the backdrop of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, which were set up in 1996 by Nelson Mandela to investigate the horrors committed under Apartheid, In My Country focuses on Malan, an Afrikaans journalist and poet covering the hearings for state radio. Optimistic and supportive of the hearings, she finds her beliefs and perspective challenged when she meets Langston Whitfield (Samuel L Jackson), an outspoken and prickly Washington post journalist also covering the hearings.

Where she sees an uplifting process of healing and reconciliation, he sees a situation that effectively allows the guilty to walk away from their crimes without any punishment, and the two soon butt heads. But over time, their shared experience of listening to the moving and painful testimony brings them ever closer, and though both are married with children, they embark on a brief but intense affair.

“I think they have an affair because in the real world she’s an outsider,” says Binoche. “It’s like she doesn’t belong to the world no more because she’s been through so much. So she needed someone to share that with, and I think that he was the one because she had the most conflict with him. And he was touched by her.”

The star reports that even the film’s retelling of true events finally got to her. “There was a moment that I couldn’t take the pain anymore,” she recalls. “It was too much, all the stories of torture and murder, knowing it had really happened. I hate to think about it, but just getting on set once I felt dizzy.”

The film was shot on location in South Africa, where the star spent several months travelling and researching her role. “People think actors have such glamorous lives, but the truth is actors go where nobody wants to go,” she notes. “It takes courage to go to places that it feels like can’t do one more day like that. You have to take the responsibility of doing it, because that’s the way that you show what’s happening in people’s lives, what can be done, question marks, consciousness - that’s how you work. But I’ve never felt that being an actress is being in a comfortable place. It’s seen from the outside that we’re being driven in big cars and having these gorgeous suites and all of that. But come on, it’s not about that.

I’ve been away from home for three weeks, from my children. I’ve been to Rome, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, New York, I’m here and I’m leaving tomorrow to finally see my family.”

Ask her why she doesn’t take her kids - she has an 11 year old son, Raphael, and a 5 year old daughter, Hannah - with her and she gives a gallic shrug. “Not a trip like that, no, because when would I see them?” she asks. “They have other things to do than following their mother around from airport to airport.”

Ironically, Binoche couldn’t even get out of the airport in her last film, Jet Lag, a light souffle of a romantic comedy in which she played Rose, a bubbly but lonely Parisian beautician who finds herself stranded at Charles de Gaulle when an air-traffic controllers’ strike hits. Rose also finds herself drawn to the moody, fussy Felix (Jean Reno), an ex-chief turned food mogul who lends her his cellphone (after she drops hers down the loo) and then rescues her fom her long time abusive boyfriend.

Despite many relationships over the years including a passionate affair with Olivier Martinez, her handsome co-star in the Horseman on the Roof, the actress has never married. Why not? “I’ve been asked several times if I’d marry - two times at the start of relationships, and two times at the end,” she explains. “And I didn’t say ’non’. I just didn’t answer them.” She pauses and then adds “Maybe I should have.”

“I think one day I’ll get married, but I don’t know” she sighs. “Maybe it’s because my mother divorced and my grandmother divorced, so maybe I’m frightened deep down. But then I also feel there is no real need. Why do I need to get married? To reassure me? No I don’t need reassurance.” La Binoche ponders this for a moment. “It’s interesting about marriage, because this psychic once told me that I’d get married before I’m 45, so I still have a little time left. I don’t know why 45, but that’s what she said.” She pauses and laughs. “I suppose that’s my sell by date.”

Binoche who’s an intensely private woman, won’t talk much about the fathers of her two children. The father of her son, Andre Halle, is a director of photography she reportedly met on the set of a movie, and she currently lives outside of Paris with the father of Hannah, actor Benoit Maginel.

But the actress, who is well known for her work ethic ("actually, I think perhaps I am a bit workaholic"), will happily talk about her children and admits that motherhood has changed her outlook about work. “It’s amazing to see how fast they grow,” she says. “I don’t want miss any of that, so I like being at home more. But also I’m lucky being an actress, as they can travel with me. In fact, the first time my son decided to stay at home instead was when I went to South Africa to make this film. That was his choice. I took my daughter and Raphael, because he was nine, I asked him, ’Do you want to come with me or do you want to stay with your father?’ And he said he wanted to stay home with his father. I always took him around and he went to different schools in New York, in London and all that. So I thought that he was old enough to choose now. And so he chose to stay and it was painful for him. So when I had another film in London, I said ’Do you want to come?’ He said ‘yes, I am coming now.’

As for travelling with her five year old daughter, “It does make things more complicated, because you have to really be organised so that they can have a familiar rhythm to their lives,” she says. “It’s a dilemma, it’s difficult, but when women work that much it’s always a dilemma. So you have to flow with the wind. You have to go with your life. I don’t know what’s coming tomorrow and you try to do the best you can at each minute and be as fair as you can with your family. Sometimes it’s difficult, but I’m glad I took her on this film as we had weekends off. It’s wonderful there for children. It’s a beautiful country. So we took some time off together and she loved it.”

Does Binoche want to have more children while she still can? “Let me tell you, two’s quite handful,” she laughs. “It’s a lot, and they need your constant love and attention. They have their demands, and when you’re tired it’s not easy.”

Binoche recently turned the big 4-0. Does she worry about aging in a business where there is so much pressure to look young? “I think it’s very tough in Hollywood for women,” she admits. “Actresses worry that they won’t work anymore once they hit 40 and they seem obsessed with their looks and plastic surgery. But I think it’s a little different in Europe, because 40 is really the best age for a woman. That’s when we hit our peak and become this ripe fruit.” She mimes squeezing a succulent piece of fruit and burts out laughing at the image.

Indeed, now in her 40s, Binoche looks better than ever. So what is the actress’ beauty secret? “I think it’s the same simple thing for everyone - to be happy, and have love in your life,” she says. “And anyway, I have a lot of films coming out in the next year or so, so I really don’t give a damn about age. I just work hard.” Would Binoche ever consider moving to Hollywood? “I don’t think so, because I love France and Paris, and I have my roots there and that’s fine,” she explains. “I like travelling and if I have to come to Hollywood to make a movie I will, but otherwise I’d never move there. It’s very much an industry town and that doesn’t really interest me.”

Binoche says she also has little interest in fashion or shopping. “Naturally I love some designers, like Prada and Dolce and Gabbana, but I’m not obsessed with clothes, and people are shocked, but I don’t like shopping - it makes me feel too guilty,” she laughs. “Especially when I was just in South Africa. You’re very aware of all the poverty and the children begging in the street. And then back home I get a lot of clothes free from designers anyway, so that takes care of it.”

Binoche has always loved to paint in her spare time, and especially while on locations. “I painted on ’the English Patient’ because the scenery was so beautiful and I wanted to give some kind of present at the end when I had to leave,” she explains, “and we’d been rehearsing in this old monastery in Tuscany and there were lots of pottery places around there so I made a little sketch of a design that they could put on a piece of pottery, and they used it.

Sadly for Binoche, that present doesn’t include one of her favourite pleasures in life - good chocolate. “I was so happy when they cast me in Chocolat, because it’s one of my vices,” she admits. “I adore chocolate. But then just lately I started to become allergic to it, so I’ve had to be careful. Apart from all that, life is wonderful. So it’s really a small sacrifice.”

Juliette International

Irish Times: Sat Feb 7th 2004
Ciara Dwyer talks to French actress Juliette Binoche (thanks to Donal)

It is hard to believe that French actress Juliette Binoche has been making movies for 20 years. It began with one scene in Pascal Kané's 1983 political drama Liberty Belle. Today Binoche arrives in Berlin for the premiere of her latest political drama, Irish adoptee John Boorman's Country of My Skull also starring Samuel L. Jackson and our very own Brendan Gleeson.

Binoche who turns 40 this year seems finally to be embarking on the international career that has beckoned since her sensational English language debut opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in the 1988 adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Binoche is currently in San Francisco filming a new movie with writer/director team David Siegel and Scott McGhee. Speaking to us by phone Binoche is enthusiastic about her increasingly busy schedule.

"I have a lot on my plate at the moment", she enthuses, "but I have only agreed to films that truly interest me. I won't do something just for the sake of working".

Last year was supposed to be a very busy year for Binoche, but in the end she only managed to film Boorman's film. An adaptation of Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile was cast by Fred Schepisi but failed to get any funding.

"I think it was too left of field for producers at the time. It wasn't a safe bet. We had a great cast and a great script but not a cent of funding", the actress explains.

After Country of My Skull wrapped in June, Binoche signed to star in Michael Apted's updating of The Canterbury Tales. The film was tentatively called Scheherazade and was to star Binoche with Lawrence Fishburne and Gary Sinise. Four days before the London based shoot was to begin funding was pulled by the major backer.

"I learned a lot last year about the current difficulties in independent film making. Money is promised one minute and gone the next. I was bitterly disappointed about Scheherazade. It was one of the best scripts I have ever read. I've also never done a thriller. Michael [Apted] is busy trying to set it up again and we hope to shoot late this summer".

In November Binoche signed on to Siegel and Mcghee's Bee Season based on the novel by Myla Goldberg. In the film Binoche will play a Jewish mother who's marriage is on the rocks. Playing her husband is Richard Gere. The film began filming in San Francisco last week.

"Its a big adventure for me", the actress explains, "I received the script in October. I hadn't heard of David and Scott. Then Anthony Minghella (who directed Binoche in The English Patient) phoned me and told me to read it. I also watched their other movies Suture and The Deep End. The family dynamic in their second movie intrigued me. I spoke to Tilda Swinton who had a very rich experience with them. Then I said yes."

Bee Season marks the first time Binoche has filmed in the United States. The cast also includes Max Minghella (son of Anthony) and rising star Kate Bosworth. It will be released in theatres later in the year and will be 20th Century Fox's big Oscar hope for 2004/05.

While Binoche seems to be moving into more mainstream international productions the star of Kieslowski's Blue and Michael Haneke's Code Unknown is not leaving her roots in either French cinema or the arthouse behind. She is due to make a second film with Haneke after Bee Season. The film titled Caché (Hidden) will co-star the ubiquitous Daniel Auteuil, and is the story of a wife who realises in horror that her husband may not be quite the man she thinks he is. Coming from the director of Funny Games and The Piano Teacher we dread to think.

"Horror is something I'm quite interested in. Not in terms of slasher movies or genre movies. But the ideas of fear and disgust and revulsion as attitudes and reactions fascinate me. I am due to film Gardner McKay's Toyer with Brian de Palma later in the year".

Sweet Juliette Binoche in an adaptation of Toyer? Surely not! Apparently so. The terrifying piece has been adapted by de Palma and the cast includes Jeremy Northam, Tilda Swinton and Tcheky Karyo. De Palma is re-setting the piece to Venice and opening it up to include a cat and mouse chase through the canals of Venice.

That brings us to the subject of her most immediate engagement: Boorman's Country of My Skull. In the South African set film Binoche plays an Afrikaner poet and journalist who clashes with an American journalist because of their conflicting reactions to the evidence being revealed during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

"I'm not sure we have a commercial film on our hands, it is extremely harrowing in its account of violence and injustice in that country. I hope it makes people aware of what happened in South Africa. It was an extremely interesting journey for me as an actress".

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Antjie Krog, indeed Binoche's character Anna Malan is based on the author. The film will be released in the autumn. Binoche has been given time off the set of Bee Season to attend the Berlin premiere today, at which Boorman and Gleeson are also expected to put in an appearance.

Binoche obviously has her hands full for 2004, but has she got plans beyond that or will she be taking another break from our screens?

"I have nothing set in stone yet", she says, "but I have a few different things in various stages of development. I always keep a few projects in the back of my mind. I have been talking lately to Patrice Chereau and François Dupeyron about different ideas. I also plan to work with Emir Kusturica in the next year or so. He has written a wonderful script about Yugoslavia in the 1900s and in the 1990s. I also plan to work with Anthony Minghella again soon, maybe on an adaptation of Bernard Schlink's The Reader, maybe on something else. Most of all I want to have different experiences in different films."

Author/s: Graham Fuller
Issue: March, 2001

HOLLYWOOD ADORES HER. WILL OSCAR?

A happily unmarried mother of a 7-year-old son and a baby daughter, Binoche turns 37 on March 9. We met in her dressing room before an evening performance of Betrayal. I only had to turn my tape recorder on to elicit her trademark intensity.

GRAHAM FULLER: The women you play are often extraordinarily passionate and draw extraordinary passion to them. Why do you think there's this thread in your work?

JULIETTE BINOCHE: Because it enables me to feel the burning of acting and the consuming of being--it's one reason I think I'm attracted to the stage in particular. it's my way of expressing that I'm alive and i just want to open my arms and my heart and go for it. Even though I'm scared sometimes and I have doubts like most people, it's my way to embrace life and thank life, in a way.

GF: Specifically, though, you tend to play romantically passionate women. They're rarely repressed. Even the woman in Damage, who was outwardly cold, was the center of an emotional storm.

JB: Well, the woman in Blue was more repressed. The light's been taken out of her and she doesn't want to get back to it. She can't allow herself that love or openness because there's too much pain. But, you know, when I choose a film I need to believe in it and believe I can do something special with it, and after a while that means not trying to judge or analyze why I should do it. You have to follow this intuition thing, which is a mystery to me.

GF: Is it dangerous to analyze it?

JB: It flattens your perspective. I'll be happy to analyze in a few years, but I don't find it necessary at the moment. I just live with it and try to be as true as possible and choose what I feel it's good for me to give or receive. That makes the shape of the landscape for me.

GF: Do you ever get blocked?

JB: Sometimes I don't see the perspective, yes. It comes from being doubtful. If you are patient, the emotions will come out by themselves. I think acting is about forgetting yourself in order to give the best of yourself. It's passing through you more than you're creating it. You're not the flower, but the vase which holds the flower.

GF: Do you ever find yourself taking a wrong step?

JB: Oh, yes. It's necessary. And in front of an audience, sometimes. But it's a way of taking a step forward and being brave to go there in order to improve it, I think.

GF: Directors love your face and often focus on it adoringly-like that lingering shot when you're weeping in Bad Blood. How does that make you feel?

JB: I try to see my films just once. it's like a dream you've been through when it's been intense, and you just have to go through it once more just to make sure you've had it. And, actually, I don't feel at ease because it's like looking at myself in a mirror with a lot of people watching. I think I'm better at looking at a mirror in a room when I'm alone. It takes me a while to allow myself to love myself.

GF: Why have you always refused to talk about your private life?

JB: I'm interested in [disclosing my] intimacy through films or theater. But the questions about someone's personal life in interviews are so related to outside concerns that I say no to them. When you are being interviewed and you answer personal questions, you open a little door and eventually the person gets inside the bedroom and you go, "Why don't you come in and sit down?" I think I show my intimate life on the screen, and if someone can't see it, I can't explain it.

GF: Do you feel you've still got some big questions to answer?

JB: I don't think you need an answer when you ask the right question, but, oh, there are many questions. That's why I still want to do this mad work as an actress. It's the only way to continue.

GF: How do you feel about aging?

JB: I don't feel about it. It's the way it goes. We can still be burning and vivid inside.

GF: I think one of the reasons Garbo stopped working was that she wanted to preserve her look.

JB: That's not for me. I think I'm braver. [laughs] I think aging is a wonderful change, because you have to let go of so much bullshit, especially in regard to this movie star thing. I believe that being an actress or being involved in a movie has to be a life experience, otherwise why go for it? I have to change me, and I have to learn things, and I have to push me and my limits. By acting, I find a freedom inside of a prison in a way.

GF: And you relish that liberation?

JB: It's a need. [laughs]

Graham Fuller is Interview's Film Writer at Large.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group

Q&A With Juliette Binoche (thanks Lila)

Source:

Academy Award-winning actress Juliette Binoche, star of Oscar-nominated Chocolat answers the PrimeTime Q&A

Q: What makes someone sexy?
A: What makes a person sexy is when he's not trying to be sexy.

Q: Who for dinner?
A: I would have loved to have met Marilyn Monroe and have dinner with her.

Q: If not acting, what would you do?
A: It's painting, because it's another way of expressing yourself.

Q: Greatest fear?
A: Sometimes with my son I fear that I'm absent — too absent.

Q: What makes you mad?
A: When somebody's lying.

Q: What do you spend money on? 

A: Funny enough, I don't spend my money because I don't have time to spend it.

Q: Your last meal?
A: I don't know if I want to eat before I die. I'm not sure about that. You know, I would probably have other things to do than eat something.

Q: Happiest moment? 

A: The happiest moment of my life. You know, making love with someone and you feel this is really - everything is related to physic, spirit. Inside, outside, everything is related. It's the beautiful moment.

Sweet success

Source: The Guardian, Thursday February 15, 2001

She made her name playing tragic women. Now she stands to win an Oscar for her role as a free-spirited confectioner. Danny Leigh meets Juliette Binoche

I've had firmer handshakes. But not many. And then you remember that the fearsome grip whitening your knuckles belongs to the leading European actress of her generation: Juliette Binoche, famous for her porcelain beauty and elegant melancholy, evidently blessed with the fists of a trucker.

Big, hearty smile. Exchange of how-are-yous. I say fine. She smirks. "Not too bad," comes the reply, before she looks away, puzzled, like it's the first time she's thought about it. Big, hearty laugh. "Hmm. I guess I'm fine too."

If the handshake is jarring, the laugh is more so: loud, open-mouthed and utterly at odds with her own iconography. It's the kind of raucous guffaw she delivers repeatedly in Lasse Hallstrom's Chocolat, in which she plays a free-spirited confectioner bringing candies and single-parenthood to an uptight post-war French village.

Two days ago Binoche received an Oscar nomination for her troubles (her second; she won best supporting actress for The English Patient in 1997). When asked what she thought of her chances, she allowed herself a "We'll see"; hours later, the news wires were brimming with hastily posed pictures of her in celebration, pretending to devour a vast bar of chocolate.

Which is not quite what you expect from Juliette Binoche. Neither is the feelgood warmth of Chocolat. "You think I'm cold?" she asks. I gabble that that wasn't what I meant. Just that there has been a constant undercurrent of tragedy to the widows, mistresses and blinded artists that have filled her career since her early-80s breakthrough in Godard's Hail Mary.

"Oh, tragedy," she says airily. "Well, yes. But cold doesn't go with tragedy. And anyway, I think the characters I've played have been survivors of tragedy. So, really, they were kind of positive in their way."

I ask if the move was deliberate, whether the frothiness of her latest project was a conscious attempt to sidestep her image. While I am talking, she nods, as if indulging a harmless but slow-witted child. "On this movie?" she says eventually. "No. That's not what I wanted at all. But to express something like this story, in which there is a light - yes, I wanted that. In life, you have to demand. It clarifies your will. So, for me, more than trying to be different this way, or that way, it's about telling a story I feel connected to, as a human being and an actor."

Another smile, more fixed this time, then a pregnant pause, and a long, impassive gaze into the middle distance. That's more like it - Juliette Binoche, gazing impassively into the middle distance.

The soulful looks and enigmatic silences come as no surprise. After all, despite her protestations, that's what she does best, a half-stunned gravity in keeping with her status as an arthouse heroine with a vocal distaste for Hollywood. So you watch her gazing round the room and assume, as so many have assumed, that she must be thinking of pain, and loss, and the darker corners of philosophy. Until she laughs her silly-me laugh, and you know she was just thinking about lunch, or picking up her laundry.

Then she starts talking and you realise you were right the first time. She explains her pain and loss with the straight-faced passion of someone for whom everything else is chit-chat.

I mention that she laughs more in Chocolat than in her previous body of work combined. "Yes, but, I mean... life is tragic. And sometimes you need the distance of laughter, because you don't know why we live, or why we die, or why we're called human beings when we act like animals. So yes, I like to put those questions inside people." She reels through a litany of her characters, pointing out how and why they may be troubled, but never tragic. Or cold.

"When I was younger," she says, "I was always the optimist. But the more I go through life, the more I think pessimism is truly realistic. It's more fun, too, because if you are a pessimist you are shocked about the good things." Cue laugh.

I ask what stemmed her optimism. "Well, being an optimist was like a disguise. I was using it to get through life, you know? And there is a heaviness with me. It's like when you asked me if I was well. To be truthful, I'm exhausted. But at the same time there is a lightness to my exhaustion, because I chose to be here, and I'm happy if this film makes people happy."

She segues into an anecdote about a woman with one lung who taught her Gregorian chants, and a lengthy metaphor describing how "when you break your knee, you enjoy walking differently". Triumph in adversity, I say hopefully. She nods again, as if the slow-witted child has finally caught up. "Yes. When we learn that tragedy is a treasure in disguise, then we begin to understand life. It's like when I see a lot of comic films, I feel depressed. Like this is so shallow, and such... nonsense. To me, saying, 'This is tragedy and this is comedy,' putting everything in its box, it doesn't make sense."

But if she doesn't see the world like that, the directors she has worked with usually have, habitually dispatching her into doomed affairs and bereavements. She may be laughing now, but in the past, the self-conscious auteurs she gravitates towards have forbidden her from doing so, in case it ruins their angst-ridden tableaux.

How does it feel, being ordered not to smile? "Well, sometimes I felt like a horse." She pulls at the corners of her mouth, as if wearing a bit. "Like, I promise I won't gallop. But the relationship between directors and actors is full of competition. And sometimes directors fall under the power of an actress."

With Binoche they certainly have. Other than tragedy, the recurring motif in her films is their devotion to her face; huge chunks of screen time are given over to her static, masklike features. And the ardour isn't restricted to male film-makers: last week, Gwyneth Paltrow was reported to have signed up for an adaptation of Jeanette Winterson's The Passion on the condition that Binoche play her lover.

"Are you only interested in my face?" she asks. I can't tell if she's joking. No, I say, but I've read three articles about her in the last two days, all of which have remarked that the best medium for her undoubted beauty may not be movies, but photographs. "Someone said that? Hmm... maybe it's true then. But I think what's important is behind the face. Anyway, I don't think I have a particularly beautiful face."

Her features, it would seem, fall into the category of what Binoche regards as trivia. So we move on to ageing instead and - at 36 and playing mothers as routine - she becomes more animated. "I know it's a big issue," she says, "but truly, for me it's not. I think 20 is a beautiful age, but it's also very difficult. Thirty was better. Forty, who knows? It will be strange for me as an actress, but there are different ways to be seductive.

"It's like, sometimes there is something between you and yourself - the ego, right? And the person with the ego inside you says, 'Oh, I'm angry with this' or 'Oh, I'm jealous of that'. And you have to be tolerant of that little person, and say to them, 'Ssh. It's OK to think that, but you must know that you're wrong.' " I'm already anticipating our farewell handshake when she lets out another of her laughs. "Like a teacher. You know?"

Fame isn't fine by Juliette Binoche

Source: USA Today, March 19, 1997

by Stephan Schaefer

She is the worldwide face of Lancôme and "The English patient's" best supporting actress Oscar nominee, but Juliette Binoche abhors the "cult of personality" of international stardom.

"To be an actress was the only thing I wanted," she says. "The consequence I didn't dream of, being a public person". Famous enough in France to be known simply as "la Binoche", the Paris-born-and-raised actress made a splash in the USA this year in the world war two romance "The English patient" as the maternal Canadian nurse Hana, who cares for Ralph Fienne's grotesque burn victim.

"I want to be a normal person, be a storyteller and not be a star," she says. "An actor has to forget himself and replace himself through another person. That's why you're here."

Binoche, 33, has already chosen the outfit she'll wear to the Oscars on march 24: it's a dark pink dress by French designer Sophie Sitbon. "Her clothes are very feminine, and although not well-known, she's independent. I'm very keen on that."

Her expectations of her first Oscar night are modest. "Some people told me it's kitsch and tacky. You've got to have fun (because) it's all false and funny." Binoche was in Paris on a photo shoot when the nominations were announced. "I was cool" she says, "I remember I was excited, but not frightened." Director/Screenwriter Anthony Minghella wasn't as calm. "Anthony had to lie down before he got the news, he couldn't stand waiting anymore."

Binoche hasn't changed. What ever she does next has to "be a necessity", she says. "Having a success doesn't make it more difficult; I try to stay focused on the quality more than anything else."

She's trying to convince Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami ("Through the olive trees") that she's not too young for his next picture. "I always had that problem, with Louis Malle for "Damage", and Krzyrztof Kieslowski (for "Blue"), and Kiarostami thinks that now. There's a moment it makes me smile, but it's beyond the age... Meryl Streep is luminous and marvelous beyond any age, and she'll work until she's dead, because you can believe that she's a real person and life is going through her. That's what we go to see in movies: life and truth. That's what I want to see. I don't want to see American murder films, with guns and angry faces. It's too violent and gives a kind of pollution everywhere in the world. An actress should be conscious of that and be responsible for that."