Juliette Binoche: 'Depardieu wanted to kill me. But I am still here'
|
Version 0 of 1. Clouds of Sils Maria is a handsome backstage melodrama that scampers in and out of the wings with such gusto that it’s hard to tell where the rehearsal ends and the performance begins. Juliette Binoche plays Maria Enders, a revered French actor in pensive middle-age. Enders is a woman at a crossroads – forced to confront her own legacy and adapt to an industry increasingly in thrall to the teen demographic. It’s a hazardous business, drawing facile parallels between actor and character, and yet Olivier Assayas’s film all but stipulates that viewers do. It assures us that Enders is Binoche and that Binoche is Enders – at least up to a point, for the purpose of the drama. “I don’t take it personally,” the actor insists with a shrug. “Except that maybe I should, because that’s totally what it is.” We meet in a Eurotrash bar on the French Riviera. The walls are lined with monochrome portraits of movie stars, each so airbrushed that they verge on anonymity. Binoche turned 51 last birthday; she is no longer the tremulous ingenue who graced the likes of Three Colours Blue or Les amants du Pont-Neuf. The years have warmed and weathered her. Her new film provides her with ample opportunity to reflect on how far she has come. Her relationship with the director takes us right back to the start. It was Assayas, it transpires, who co-wrote what would become Binoche’s breakthrough role as the impulsive young actor in 1985’s Rendez-vous, and the pair have stayed friends ever since. Clouds of Sils Maria was not so much inspired by Binoche as devised from the ground up with her specifically in mind. “I didn’t set out with the idea of writing a great part for Juliette,” Assayas tells me. “It was never, ‘Oh, let’s have her as a headmistress in a dangerous suburban school’, or ‘Let’s have her as a trader in Singapore’ or anything like that. No – I deliberately set out to have Juliette as she is, as the person that she is. That’s more interesting than any fiction I could invent around her.” Assayas, then, paints a portrait of an earnest, committed artist who takes her work so seriously that she sometimes worries its demands are beyond her. We learn that Maria came to fame in an acclaimed stage play about the life-changing affair between a girl of 18 and a woman in her 40s. Now she is being asked to reprise the production, this time taking the role of the bitter, brittle older lover. She is further challenged by the presence of her formidable young assistant, Valentine (played by Kristen Stewart, who, in February, won a César for the role). Passing a cigarette back and forth, the two women argue the merits of Hollywood blockbuster versus European arthouse and rehearse the lines of the play to the point where it comes to define and to channel the tension between them. This creative friction was not exclusively confined to the screen. Binoche explains that she likes to rehearse whereas her co-star does not. Instead, she says, the 25-year-old Stewart would read over the scene a few minutes before the camera rolled and that this worked best for the character; it kept Valentine feeling fresh and spontaneous. “It was her way of dealing with her fear,” she adds. Somewhere around the middle of the film there is a telling moment when the women bathe in a secluded Swiss lake. Binoche strips off and strolls into the water without a care in the world. But Stewart is mindful to keep her underwear on. It strikes me that this scene might highlight another difference between their approaches – pitting uninhibited France against image-conscious Hollywood. Binoche laughs; she’s not entirely sure. “We didn’t discuss any of that beforehand. I didn’t know whether Kristen was going to be naked or not. But I think the choice was more natural than you think it was. The characters are alone by the lake. There’s some kind of seduction going on. My character is more free so it was not right being cautious. But maybe the assistant wants to protect herself. So her decision made sense to me. I can explain it that way.” She concedes, however, that they arrived at the film from vastly different directions. Stewart remains best remembered for her role as Bella Swan in the phenomenally popular Twilight franchise. Binoche, by contrast, famously turned down Jurassic Park in order to work with the Polish film-maker Krzysztof Kieslowski. “It’s true – I made a clear decision of not going to America and staying in France,” she says. “Kristen started very early and took off with an explosion in the teenager world. I was always more interested in journalists recognising my work. So we have different stories, but it’s not better or worse. You choose your own path and hopefully meet up in the middle.” She was born in Paris to an artistic, middle-class family. Her elder sister, Marion, was drawn towards photography, but from an early age Binoche longed to act. She knew what she wanted and felt she had no time to waste. “I believed in myself, even if nobody else did. There was a confidence in me. My need to express myself was so big. I would call it my fire. My drive. My desire to attack.” I tell her she sounds quite the tigress and she responds with a startling bark of laughter; the image seems to please her. “I had a ruthless spell,” she admits. “Because I knew what I was here for. I think that with time I’ve learned to become more elastic and airy.” She was still in her teens when she landed a supporting role in Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary, a contemporary retelling of the virgin birth. From there she bounded through the jolting romances of Rendez-vous, painted the Seine with fireworks in Les amants du Pont-Neuf and collected the best supporting actress Oscar for her work on Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient. She became the go-to muse for the great European auteurs; a fetching moral compass for knotty psychological drama. But the whirlwind had its consequences and turned her household upside-down. “It was hard for my family because my name became famous. So for my sister to go shopping, signing a cheque was a problem. She ended up changing her name. It was a real problem to adapt. There is a natural equilibrium to a family. And when that gets disturbed it stirs up emotions.” She has torn through high-profile relationships with the likes of Mathieu Amalric, Daniel Day-Lewis and director Leos Carax. She has a 21-year-old son with André Hallé, a scuba-diver, and a 15-year-old daughter with the actor Benoît Magimel. She says, “Friends and relationships – that’s another problem. Fame is very destabilising. But you try to go through it together. My work is important but my relationships are too. It’s not one against the other. My children were not an accident. What I feel I want to do on earth belongs to me, but there is still room for other things. I have to be a mother as well.” The way Assayas tells it, hunger and passion are her defining traits. “Juliette is honest, straightforward, trusting and naive,” he explains. “Once she decides to give, she gives all the way. When she works with someone who has bad taste or is on the wrong wavelength, she can end up in absurd places. She goes all the way and sometimes goes too far.” Undeniably her list of credits are dappled with the odd eccentric choice (a recent cameo in Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla springs to mind). Yet she waves these away as though they are distant cousins, barely related to her at all. Where she differs from Maria Enders is that she dislikes looking back. The past, she insists, is only important to the extent that it can be mined to fuel the work of the present. “So yes, I do use memories and moments. I’ll use anything I can of my emotional baggage or previous actions. But that’s only because the more experience you have, the better you are.” She says that’s why she’s a better actor today than she was at 18. Since completing work on Clouds of Sils Maria, Binoche has moved on yet again. She will next be seen driving huskies across the Arctic tundra in Isabel Coixet’s period saga Nobody Wants the Night, and recently played Antigone on the London stage, a role she will reprise at the Edinburgh festival in August. She claims to have no particular preference for theatre or film; the magic can work equally well in either discipline. “Whichever one, I love being a part of the process. I love observing the hands preparing the set or the crew setting up for the shot. Even more now than I did in the past. Before, I would go to my trailer to prepare. But the best way to prepare is to simply be there with the others. Because that’s the relationship. It’s a conversation with others.” At home, she’s the closest thing the French republic has to royalty. They call her “La Binoche”, as though she has become her own brand, an inviolate definite article, and this appears to stick in the craw of some of her contemporaries. A few years back, Gérard Depardieu confessed he was entirely stumped as to what anyone saw in her. “She has nothing, absolutely nothing,” he told one interviewer. “Please can you explain to me what the secret of this actress is meant to be.” I wonder if she might like to do the honours right now? Explain her appeal; put the man out of his misery. “What’s the secret?” Binoche frowns and appears to give the question deep thought. “There is a secret, I think. When you are front of a camera there is something that happens. Some relationship, some movement, some strange kind of suspension. That’s where you find the layer in yourself that is duplicated in everyone. And when you get it right, if you can imagine all the hearts beating in one beat, it’s like that. It’s beautiful.” But even Binoche cannot maintain such a level of seriousness. When she recalls Depardieu’s comments, a mischievous mirth overtakes her. She raises one arm in a frantic stabbing motion, like Norman Bates in the Psycho shower scene. “He wanted to kill me,” she says with relish. “He wanted to kill me. But I am still here.” Clouds of Sils Maria is out on Friday. Antigone is at the King’s theatre, Edinburgh 8-22 August |