Feb 12, 2011 Filed Under: Articles Comments (0)

SHE”S a bit of a joker, but when it comes to her career, Juliette Binoche is very serious.

JULIETTE Binoche’s theatrical presence fills every inch of the room. With swept back hair, a black velvet smoking jacket and a white open-necked shirt, she looks a little bit like a female dandy. The film star the French media likes to call “La Binoche” is now 46, and the angles and lines of her face stronger and more defined, but she still retains a delicate, refined beauty. She has lost none of her sense of humour. As we chat at the smart Hotel Louvre in Paris she laughs often and is casually flirtatious. This isn’t a star just going through the motions. She’s animated and expressive, rolling her eyes, leaning back and forward. And just to make sure I’m paying attention, early on she fixes me with a piercing gaze and never lets go.

Physically, she has the body of a dancer, the legacy of a year spent rehearsing for, and then touring the world with, the theatrical dance show In-I (in 2008-09). The decision to pursue a new career in her 40s, never having danced professionally, is the sort of unconventional choice for which she’s known. “I feel lucky and blessed,” she says. “I had the luxury of choosing to stop acting and to do some dance; I travelled the world and did painting and poetry. When I went back to acting the film had been quite successful. It’s like I’m living good dreams.”

The “successful” film in question is Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, filmed in mid-2009. The bittersweet, unconventional comedy competed for the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. While it didn’t take home the top prize, Binoche was named best actress, making her the first person to win the “triple crown” of best actress awards at Cannes, Venice and Berlin. For those who care about such things, she also has an Oscar for The English Patient and was nominated for a second, for Chocolat.

Binoche says that dancing has changed the way she thinks about acting. After moving constantly on stage, she found being still on camera challenging. Instead, she found movement in her emotions, pirouetting from a comic face one moment to a wounded visage with watering eyes the next. “The stillness allowed me to do almost a dance of emotion,” she says. “I could feel it inside of me and I’ve never felt that before. I think it comes from the dancing and then having to be still, of passing from one emotion to the next with pleasure.”

Star of more than 40 films, Binoche was “discovered” at Cannes in 1985 in Andre Techine’s erotic movie Rendez-Vous, about a country girl who discovers life in Paris. She came to international attention in Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being three years later and cemented her reputation in the 1990s with the famous Three Colours trilogy.

Certified Copy grew out of her friendship with Kiarostami – their paths had crossed at Cannes. When she was visiting him at his Tehran office one day, he began telling a story about a brief encounter he’d had with a woman. As the actress leaned forward and hung on his every word, Kiarostami embellished the tale, eventually describing how a misunderstanding led the couple to pretend they had been married for many years, though they’d known each other less than a day.

I ask if she believed his tale. She stares at me, and says seriously: “It was a completely true story.”

There’s a pause here; I’m not entirely sure how to react. Then Binoche bursts out laughing, leans back and wags a finger at me. “I caught you!” she exclaims gleefully. “No, he said it was a true story and I believed part of it was – and part of it wasn’t. But I was so interested he started making it up, trying to make my pleasure last longer.”

Kiarostami transformed the tale into a screenplay about a pompous British author James (William Shimell) who meets French woman Elle (Binoche) while promoting his new book in Tuscany. They head off together to a village for the day and James blathers on endlessly about his book’s thesis: that a copy has as much intrinsic value as the original in art. And then suddenly the film shifts – the pair are mistaken for a married couple, and slip in to the roles of a bickering pair for whom the love has turned sour 15 years on. Their new roles are so wholeheartedly embraced and it’s all so convincingly done that the audience is left wondering if they’ve misunderstood the beginning or misread the subtitles. Perhaps they really have been married for 15 years …

Binoche is clearly still delighted by this central “trick”. “I just loved the idea of this woman taking this man for her husband in a changing conversation,” she says, giggling. “He’s an author so he enjoys making a little game of it and then he gets caught up in it and has to fight with her like crazy! It just made me laugh. I think deep down it’s a comedy – even though I know it’s more tragic than comedic.”

The film had a difficult birth. A number of actors who were attached as male lead later dropped out, including Robert de Niro. Filming was originally scheduled to begin in October 2007 in English; a second attempt was planned for March 2008, in French, with Sami Frey. A third try in May 2009 with Francois Cluzet also never got off the ground. What was going on? “Well of course, finding the woman was easy because I was there and it started from our friendship,” Binoche says. “But after that, trying to get the balance right was a difficult task, because it had to make sense with me.”

Kiarostami eventually settled on British opera singer Shimell. Perhaps it’s because he’s able to effortlessly switch from English to French to Italian as the role demanded. As an actor, he’s a little bit stiff.

“He was brave,” Binoche says diplomatically, adding he’d turned up on the first day of rehearsals with all of his lines memorised, as for a play. “As soon as he understood he had to link those words into his intimate life and experience, I really saw it click in him, and a door opened. After that he was able to really fly.”

Certified Copy screens on March 3 and 5 at the BigPond Adelaide Film Festival. The regular season is at Palace Nova from March 10.

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Feb 06, 2011 Filed Under: Magazines & Scans Comments (0)

Updated the gallery with two Magazine Scans with Juliette Binoche thanks to Elmira.

Gallery links:
Glamour Russia February 2011
Fotogramas – November 2010

Feb 05, 2011 Filed Under: Articles Comments (0)

Juliette Binoche explains why she won’t be rushing back to LA.

Juliette Binoche knew exactly what she wanted – and what she didn’t – when the acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami invited her to his Tehran home to work on Certified Copy (Copie Conforme).

”A big house with a man and a woman, a director and an actor, I’ve seen that,” she says, eyes shining with amusement. ”So I said to him, I don’t want to have a relationship. I think it has to be clear from the beginning so we can feel comfortable. He was looking at me and saying ‘fine, good for me, good’.”

It’s an entertaining image. The celebrated and spirited French actress, whose more than 40 films include The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Three Colours: Blue, The English Patient and Chocolat, laying down the ground rules to a venerable director after repeatedly telling him they should work together.

”His films touched me,” she says. ”And stayed with me forever.”

But Kiarostami, whose lyrical dramas include Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us and Ten, had some tricks in store as they developed a film that won Binoche the best actress award at Cannes last year.

With a title that reflects its focus on what’s real and what’s fake, Certified Copy centres on a British writer (William Shimell) who, while visiting Tuscany, embarks on an enigmatic relationship with a local woman (Binoche).

Starting work in that big house, Kiarostami told Binoche a 45-minute story about meeting a woman in Tuscany the previous summer who began to think of him as her husband … then admitted he had made the whole thing up. He also didn’t mention until the first day of rehearsals that British opera singer Shimell would be playing opposite her.

”When Abbas told me the story, I completely believed everything,” Binoche says. ”I just loved the idea of this woman taking this writer to be her husband. When I found out it wasn’t true, I was a little taken aback.”

Kiarostami has explained that his elusive approach was deliberate – he was building the story by studying Binoche’s reactions as she listened, which helped him understand ”her vulnerability, with her sensitivity, with what I knew about her soul”.

While some critics were charmed by the offbeat Tuscan romance in Certified Copy, others found it a thin intellectual exercise. Binoche, 46, considers it one of her most memorable film experiences.

”I choose directors mostly that are not going to have to change their films because [in test screenings] the audience likes it more like this or like that. I’m choosing directors that have strong feelings about what they like, what they believe in, what they feel.”

Binoche, a mother of two children aged 10 and 17, has emerged as an artist in other ways in recent years. She had an exhibition in London of her paintings of directors she has worked with, released a book that teamed these paintings with poems about directors and self-portraits in character and threw herself into a dance performance with Akram Khan that brought her to Sydney two years ago.

”For me the medium doesn’t matter,” she says. ”I could be an actress or something else. I was 14 years old when I asked myself what do I want to choose – to work as a painter or in the theatre?

”I remember seeing an artist at her exhibition and told her I was having a hard time choosing. She said why do you want to choose? Just do both.”

Binoche says she also enjoyed her last experience in Hollywood, making Dan in Real Life with Steve Carell and director Peter Hedges, but won’t be rushing back.

”Being part of a world that has so many codes, it was difficult to feel free and to feel alive and happy somehow,” she says. ”I know that some actors do certain films in order to do other films. I have a hard time getting into that sort of equation because I want my freedom all the time. I want to work with interesting directors all the time.”

Feb 05, 2011 Filed Under: Movies,Multimedia Comments (0)

Added DVD Screencaptures & Movie Trailer of “Paris” with Juliette Binoche.

Feb 04, 2011 Filed Under: Multimedia Comments (0)

Updated the media site with few wonderful vids of our belove Juliette Binoche. Enjoy!

Video gallery:
Wuntering Heights – The Ending Scene
“The Early Show� – Interview
Juliette Binoche interviewed at FIAF
“In-I� exhibition