Juliette Binoche: Femme fatale
Bond girl: Juliette Binoche is set to play a 007 role
The luminous and fragrant Juliette Binoche is not
above tooling up for an action movie - as long as it's shot in the
French arthouse style and directed by her boyfriend. By Viv Groskop
Juliette Binoche has spent her career turning down action
roles. She told Steven Spielberg 'no' to Jurassic Park and refused a
part opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible. 'I have said no to
Hollywood roles where I've been asked to play a secret agent - always
small roles where they are
seductive stereotypes,' she says. Now finally, at the age of 43, she is playing the part she has always wanted: a female James Bond. 'This one was unusual for me. I am always trying to find something that is challenging and enlightening.'
seductive stereotypes,' she says. Now finally, at the age of 43, she is playing the part she has always wanted: a female James Bond. 'This one was unusual for me. I am always trying to find something that is challenging and enlightening.'
In A Few Days in September she plays Irene, a tough-cookie
French agent protecting an American colleague (Nick Nolte) from a CIA
assassin (John Turturro). This, however, is the French arthouse version
of an action movie. It is a fast-paced, violent, edge-of-your-seat
thriller - but it also has lots of long silences and characters with
bizarre quirks (Irene has a pet tortoise and Turturro's character phones
his psychoanalyst between shoot-outs). It is the directorial debut of
the Argentine-born screenwriter Santiago Amigorena, who also happens to
be Binoche's partner. Reviews have compared it to Pulp Fiction and
praised Binoche's performance as 'bad-ass but charmingly funny'.
It is an interesting move for the Paris-based actress, who
could choose any role she wanted. Best known for her 1996 Oscar-winning
performance as the grief-stricken nurse in Anthony Minghella's The
English Patient, she was nominated for a second Academy Award for the
commercially successful Chocolat, in which she starred alongside Johnny
Depp, in 2000. Since then, Binoche has consciously taken more sober,
intellectual roles: the frumpy, restrained wife in the word-of-mouth
surprise hit of last year, Hidden, and a Bosnian war widow in her second
Minghella film, Breaking and Entering.
A Few Days in September is witty and clever, but there is a
serious point behind it - with which Binoche is more than a little
obsessed. She describes it as a dramatised version of the events
depicted in Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. It alleges that
various vested interests - including state security services around the
world - knew what was about to happen on September 11, 2001.
While preparing for the role Binoche had long conversations
with a secret agent, who consulted on the film and on whom she modelled
her character. 'Of course he could not reveal everything to me, but he
said a lot,' she says. 'Some things I forgot because it was just too
much. Certain things I was very amazed by and when I told people close
to me about them they just wouldn't believe it. Everything in there is
true,' she adds, her eyes blazing with the fervour of a conspiracy
theorist.
So is she saying the film is a dramatisation of real events? 'Absolutely,' she says. 'I went to see the Iranian ambassador at the time and he said of course it's true. Things that I thought were hidden and private… they were very open about it.' So she means the CIA and other agencies knew 9/11 was going to happen? 'Of course.' So is she saying it was an inside job? Or that al-Qa'eda was responsible? 'Everybody is responsible for it. If you only knew more, it's even more depressing.' She suddenly realises this is all getting a bit implausible and explodes into laughter. 'Humour is the only way we can deal with it.'
Binoche's stubborn insistence that everything presented in this (wholly fictional) film is true is in many ways unsurprising. In the past as an interviewee she has had a reputation as difficult, tense and moody. In her twenties she gave up talking to journalists for several years, describing the press as a form of pollution. Ten years after The English Patient, she does seem to have mellowed considerably - conspiracy theories notwithstanding.
The woman the French call 'La Binoche' has an effortless charm. Her nickname as a little girl was Juliette Brioche - supposedly she smelt as delicious as freshly baked bread. She still has a sort of fragrant, goddess-like aura. When we meet at the Dorchester Hotel in London, a favourite haunt, I almost have to stop myself from breathing her in. And she is trying hard not to intimidate: bitten fingernails, barely any make-up, messy hair, ripped jeans, a flesh-coloured bra strap peeping out from a creased camisole. But to no avail: the overall effect is luscious, radiant, ageless beauty.
She comes across as sweet but dangerously unpredictable, wearing her emotions very close to the surface. Minghella once said of her, 'She has no skin, so tears and laughter are never far away.' Any past misunderstandings almost certainly stem from her strange, transatlantic therapy-speak. We start in French but she quickly expresses a preference for English. A lot is lost in translation and many of the phrases she uses are harmless in her native language but comes across as harsh in English.
Binoche is a peculiarly attractive combination of arrogance and insecurity. When she won a Bafta award for The English Patient she wept in her acceptance speech: 'But I thought you didn't like me.' (Minghella had warned her that a British audience might not be kind towards an outsider so her surprise was genuine.) Equally, though, she has never been afraid to court criticism and is keen to tackle uncomfortable, political subjects in her films. The topic of immigration has become a constant, informing all her recent choices of roles (Hidden, Breaking and Entering, A Few Days in September). 'Immigration is a very strong contemporary subject,' she says. 'With Breaking and Entering I got immersed in the world of Sarajevo and all that tragedy.'
Her maternal grandparents were Polish and ended up at Auschwitz: imprisoned not as Jews but as intellectuals. She was recently invited to Poland with her mother, Monique - to the village where she grew up - to exhibit her drawings (Binoche is a keen amateur artist and has been known to take on commissions for French newspapers). Immigration is the theme of our age, she says: 'We have no problem going to other countries and then all of sudden they come to our country and we have a big problem.' She laughs loudly. ' "Aaargh - you're coming to our country!" Isn't that funny?'
Perhaps because of this, she says, some of her work has not been that well received in France. 'I feel like an outsider there. I work mostly abroad and foreigners are really different people. [In France] people don't know where to put me - I think there is admiration but at the same time fear.'
The films that do well in France at the moment, she says, are 'pathetic' commercial comedies. 'Art films find it difficult to survive. The critics are not helping them and they are dying.'
Luckily for Binoche, though, she has an international profile - and in any case she has always seemed keen to escape her French background. Her parents divorced at the age of four and she was sent to boarding school with her sister, Marion Stalens (now a stills photographer: they have worked on a lot of films together). Their mother, Monique Stalens, was an actress and acting teacher. Her father, Jean-Marie Binoche, was a theatre director and actor: 'I remember my father playing in Romeo and Juliet when I was very little and when he came on stage I remember screaming "Papa!" at him.' She can still recall the smell backstage the first time she went to see him.
She has said in the past that her childhood was not particularly happy: 'At school I had difficulties. I was not academic. I didn't read at the same time as the others because my parents were moving [they moved house frequently]. In those first classes, if you're not very regular, it's very hard after.' She first acted at the age of 12 and directed at the age of 17, casting herself in Ionesco's surrealist piece Le Roi Se Meurt. Which part did she play? 'The king, of course,' she guffaws, suddenly happy. 'I was in a school of girls.'
Her mother's career had an influence on her but Binoche would have gone into acting anyway, she says. 'She didn't have to push it too much. It was there. I think some children have more perception of what "artist" means than others and I was one of them. Of course as an actress she knew what it was to struggle and to make a living out of it.'
Binoche had already made her living in 11 French films when in 1988, at the age of 23, she was cast opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Les Amants du Pont-Neuf in 1991 and the Three Colours trilogy cemented her reputation as an arthouse heroine - and also as a woman whose significant relationships seemed to arise naturally from her work projects.
She had a five-year relationship with Leos Carax, the director of Les Amants, and was linked with Olivier Martinez, her co-star in The Horseman on the Roof. Her daughter Hana, seven, is by the French actor Benoît Magimel, whom she met on the set of Les Enfants du Siècle in 1999. (She also has a son, Raphaël, 14, by a professional scuba diver called André Halle.)
But it was Minghella who brought her to a mass audience with The English Patient. The two are still close and she mentions him often in conversation; she even postponed the filming of A Few Days in September - a pet project - because Minghella asked her to do Breaking and Entering. (Amigorena was, she says, 'really gracious' about allowing her to abandon his film in favour of Minghella's.)
The French use the word artiste to describe their screen actors and Binoche takes it seriously as a vocation. 'The law of acting for any actor is ups and downs. Sometimes you have wonderful roles, sometimes you have nothing. You have to accept it's like that. It's not fonctionnaire [civil servant] work. But it's true you have to say no to those roles you're not going to be nourished by. You have somehow to be a little fulfilled in it so that you can bring something out of yourself that is challenging, enlightening, creative. Otherwise you should do something else.'
When we met she had just returned from the Middle East where she was shooting with the Israeli director Amos Gitai. (The film, Disengagement, due out next year, is about the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza: Binoche plays a woman looking for her estranged daughter.) 'With certain directors I feel free to say what I feel,' she says. 'With Amos Gitai, it really is collaborative. It is difficult sometimes because he likes saying things into his megaphone and I hate that.' You cannot imagine Binoche coping with this kind of direction: she is the type to grab the megaphone herself. Directing, she says, is her future now. 'Before it was more of a thought - "Oh, one day I'd like to…" But now it's not even a fear. I think you need some more challenges to work on.'
Is this new plan intended to fit better with her family life? 'No - directing takes even more time!' It is an odd ambition, then, because she spends a lot of time with her two children. Last year she decided not to work for 11 months to be with them, turning down an opportunity to film a Marguerite Duras adaptation in Cambodia. Of motherhood she has said, 'Giving birth is like a vase of beautiful flowers. Only you're just the vase and only for a very short moment. The flowers are beautiful but they belong to themselves, not to the vase.'
Does she try to lead a normal family life? 'Normal? I never thought of it,' she says. 'What means normal? Normal is very dangerous for the soul. It can be long and difficult sometimes to be far away. Lately I took my children with me all the time. They have lived in London, New York, San Francisco, South Africa. I let my son choose now whether he wants to come or not because I think he is old enough to decide. And he needs more of his father somehow than his mother because of his age.'
She laughs uproariously at the idea of having any more children. 'I thought I was going to have three and then I had two,' she shrugs. 'Having children is a wonderful, wonderful chance. I'm happy I have a boy and a girl. They are very different.' She has found organising her working life tough. 'There were moments when I thought these two worlds were impossible. And moments when I felt guilty, of course. I mean, the fathers are very present and that's important too. As I told you, I've been taking them [away with me] all the time so it's not like two divided worlds. Even though sometimes it feels like that.'
She is girlishly coy about how she got together with Amigorena, with whom she is soon due to start shooting a second film, Another Kind of Silence, in a lead role he wrote for her. The secret agent role in A Few Days in September was not designed for her, she says: he cast her after he had written the screenplay. Did they get together during filming? 'No, no, not during the making,' she says. 'You always have an intimate relationship with someone you work with. But whether it becomes, you know, personal at the end of it… that's… you know… that's…' She trails off.
Musing on the bond between actress and director, she veers off into typically French philosophical territory. 'Does it [an on-set relationship] have an effect? Probably. It's hard to say. I think distance is good somehow. Because it allows feelings, it allows everything, it allows the need of closeness. But when you live it, actually, it's on another level. Because when it's under creation, you forget your life, you're more into creation, so after when you speak, you can do the same even though you're not living with a director. You see what I'm saying?'
What she means, one suspects, is that it is easier to be emotive on camera when you are not having a relationship with anyone on set; you can be a professional and switch your feelings on and off. This is perhaps why she is particularly adamant about the fact that she did not get together with Amigorena until after filming finished.
She remains unmarried. 'It may happen. We will see. Would I like to get married? Well, my life is not finished.' She bares her teeth like a vampire and rasps, 'I'm not dead yet.' She is right. Normal is indeed dangerous for the soul.
So is she saying the film is a dramatisation of real events? 'Absolutely,' she says. 'I went to see the Iranian ambassador at the time and he said of course it's true. Things that I thought were hidden and private… they were very open about it.' So she means the CIA and other agencies knew 9/11 was going to happen? 'Of course.' So is she saying it was an inside job? Or that al-Qa'eda was responsible? 'Everybody is responsible for it. If you only knew more, it's even more depressing.' She suddenly realises this is all getting a bit implausible and explodes into laughter. 'Humour is the only way we can deal with it.'
Binoche's stubborn insistence that everything presented in this (wholly fictional) film is true is in many ways unsurprising. In the past as an interviewee she has had a reputation as difficult, tense and moody. In her twenties she gave up talking to journalists for several years, describing the press as a form of pollution. Ten years after The English Patient, she does seem to have mellowed considerably - conspiracy theories notwithstanding.
The woman the French call 'La Binoche' has an effortless charm. Her nickname as a little girl was Juliette Brioche - supposedly she smelt as delicious as freshly baked bread. She still has a sort of fragrant, goddess-like aura. When we meet at the Dorchester Hotel in London, a favourite haunt, I almost have to stop myself from breathing her in. And she is trying hard not to intimidate: bitten fingernails, barely any make-up, messy hair, ripped jeans, a flesh-coloured bra strap peeping out from a creased camisole. But to no avail: the overall effect is luscious, radiant, ageless beauty.
She comes across as sweet but dangerously unpredictable, wearing her emotions very close to the surface. Minghella once said of her, 'She has no skin, so tears and laughter are never far away.' Any past misunderstandings almost certainly stem from her strange, transatlantic therapy-speak. We start in French but she quickly expresses a preference for English. A lot is lost in translation and many of the phrases she uses are harmless in her native language but comes across as harsh in English.
Binoche is a peculiarly attractive combination of arrogance and insecurity. When she won a Bafta award for The English Patient she wept in her acceptance speech: 'But I thought you didn't like me.' (Minghella had warned her that a British audience might not be kind towards an outsider so her surprise was genuine.) Equally, though, she has never been afraid to court criticism and is keen to tackle uncomfortable, political subjects in her films. The topic of immigration has become a constant, informing all her recent choices of roles (Hidden, Breaking and Entering, A Few Days in September). 'Immigration is a very strong contemporary subject,' she says. 'With Breaking and Entering I got immersed in the world of Sarajevo and all that tragedy.'
Her maternal grandparents were Polish and ended up at Auschwitz: imprisoned not as Jews but as intellectuals. She was recently invited to Poland with her mother, Monique - to the village where she grew up - to exhibit her drawings (Binoche is a keen amateur artist and has been known to take on commissions for French newspapers). Immigration is the theme of our age, she says: 'We have no problem going to other countries and then all of sudden they come to our country and we have a big problem.' She laughs loudly. ' "Aaargh - you're coming to our country!" Isn't that funny?'
Perhaps because of this, she says, some of her work has not been that well received in France. 'I feel like an outsider there. I work mostly abroad and foreigners are really different people. [In France] people don't know where to put me - I think there is admiration but at the same time fear.'
The films that do well in France at the moment, she says, are 'pathetic' commercial comedies. 'Art films find it difficult to survive. The critics are not helping them and they are dying.'
Luckily for Binoche, though, she has an international profile - and in any case she has always seemed keen to escape her French background. Her parents divorced at the age of four and she was sent to boarding school with her sister, Marion Stalens (now a stills photographer: they have worked on a lot of films together). Their mother, Monique Stalens, was an actress and acting teacher. Her father, Jean-Marie Binoche, was a theatre director and actor: 'I remember my father playing in Romeo and Juliet when I was very little and when he came on stage I remember screaming "Papa!" at him.' She can still recall the smell backstage the first time she went to see him.
She has said in the past that her childhood was not particularly happy: 'At school I had difficulties. I was not academic. I didn't read at the same time as the others because my parents were moving [they moved house frequently]. In those first classes, if you're not very regular, it's very hard after.' She first acted at the age of 12 and directed at the age of 17, casting herself in Ionesco's surrealist piece Le Roi Se Meurt. Which part did she play? 'The king, of course,' she guffaws, suddenly happy. 'I was in a school of girls.'
Her mother's career had an influence on her but Binoche would have gone into acting anyway, she says. 'She didn't have to push it too much. It was there. I think some children have more perception of what "artist" means than others and I was one of them. Of course as an actress she knew what it was to struggle and to make a living out of it.'
Binoche had already made her living in 11 French films when in 1988, at the age of 23, she was cast opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Les Amants du Pont-Neuf in 1991 and the Three Colours trilogy cemented her reputation as an arthouse heroine - and also as a woman whose significant relationships seemed to arise naturally from her work projects.
She had a five-year relationship with Leos Carax, the director of Les Amants, and was linked with Olivier Martinez, her co-star in The Horseman on the Roof. Her daughter Hana, seven, is by the French actor Benoît Magimel, whom she met on the set of Les Enfants du Siècle in 1999. (She also has a son, Raphaël, 14, by a professional scuba diver called André Halle.)
But it was Minghella who brought her to a mass audience with The English Patient. The two are still close and she mentions him often in conversation; she even postponed the filming of A Few Days in September - a pet project - because Minghella asked her to do Breaking and Entering. (Amigorena was, she says, 'really gracious' about allowing her to abandon his film in favour of Minghella's.)
The French use the word artiste to describe their screen actors and Binoche takes it seriously as a vocation. 'The law of acting for any actor is ups and downs. Sometimes you have wonderful roles, sometimes you have nothing. You have to accept it's like that. It's not fonctionnaire [civil servant] work. But it's true you have to say no to those roles you're not going to be nourished by. You have somehow to be a little fulfilled in it so that you can bring something out of yourself that is challenging, enlightening, creative. Otherwise you should do something else.'
When we met she had just returned from the Middle East where she was shooting with the Israeli director Amos Gitai. (The film, Disengagement, due out next year, is about the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza: Binoche plays a woman looking for her estranged daughter.) 'With certain directors I feel free to say what I feel,' she says. 'With Amos Gitai, it really is collaborative. It is difficult sometimes because he likes saying things into his megaphone and I hate that.' You cannot imagine Binoche coping with this kind of direction: she is the type to grab the megaphone herself. Directing, she says, is her future now. 'Before it was more of a thought - "Oh, one day I'd like to…" But now it's not even a fear. I think you need some more challenges to work on.'
Is this new plan intended to fit better with her family life? 'No - directing takes even more time!' It is an odd ambition, then, because she spends a lot of time with her two children. Last year she decided not to work for 11 months to be with them, turning down an opportunity to film a Marguerite Duras adaptation in Cambodia. Of motherhood she has said, 'Giving birth is like a vase of beautiful flowers. Only you're just the vase and only for a very short moment. The flowers are beautiful but they belong to themselves, not to the vase.'
Does she try to lead a normal family life? 'Normal? I never thought of it,' she says. 'What means normal? Normal is very dangerous for the soul. It can be long and difficult sometimes to be far away. Lately I took my children with me all the time. They have lived in London, New York, San Francisco, South Africa. I let my son choose now whether he wants to come or not because I think he is old enough to decide. And he needs more of his father somehow than his mother because of his age.'
She laughs uproariously at the idea of having any more children. 'I thought I was going to have three and then I had two,' she shrugs. 'Having children is a wonderful, wonderful chance. I'm happy I have a boy and a girl. They are very different.' She has found organising her working life tough. 'There were moments when I thought these two worlds were impossible. And moments when I felt guilty, of course. I mean, the fathers are very present and that's important too. As I told you, I've been taking them [away with me] all the time so it's not like two divided worlds. Even though sometimes it feels like that.'
She is girlishly coy about how she got together with Amigorena, with whom she is soon due to start shooting a second film, Another Kind of Silence, in a lead role he wrote for her. The secret agent role in A Few Days in September was not designed for her, she says: he cast her after he had written the screenplay. Did they get together during filming? 'No, no, not during the making,' she says. 'You always have an intimate relationship with someone you work with. But whether it becomes, you know, personal at the end of it… that's… you know… that's…' She trails off.
Musing on the bond between actress and director, she veers off into typically French philosophical territory. 'Does it [an on-set relationship] have an effect? Probably. It's hard to say. I think distance is good somehow. Because it allows feelings, it allows everything, it allows the need of closeness. But when you live it, actually, it's on another level. Because when it's under creation, you forget your life, you're more into creation, so after when you speak, you can do the same even though you're not living with a director. You see what I'm saying?'
What she means, one suspects, is that it is easier to be emotive on camera when you are not having a relationship with anyone on set; you can be a professional and switch your feelings on and off. This is perhaps why she is particularly adamant about the fact that she did not get together with Amigorena until after filming finished.
She remains unmarried. 'It may happen. We will see. Would I like to get married? Well, my life is not finished.' She bares her teeth like a vampire and rasps, 'I'm not dead yet.' She is right. Normal is indeed dangerous for the soul.
Comments
Post a Comment