Juliette Binoche

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0:12Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading creative figures discuss the most important influences and experiences that inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the Oscar-winning French actor Juliette Bénage. Known for her portrayal of emotionally complex characters over a 40-year career, her films have included three colours blue, Les Amands du Pont Neuf, Chocolat, and The English Patient, for which she won her Academy Award.

0:45Juliette Binoche, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. You were born in Paris in 1964 and you spent your early years there. Both of your parents were actors. What sort of work did they do? Yes, they were actors, but they were doing other things to survive. So I've seen my mother struggling, doing different little jobs, until she came back to studies, doing literature, French literature, and got her exam after six years of being at university. So meanwhile, we were not poor, but we were very restricted. And my father was a communist, and he was, like, fighting for the people.

1:27But, yes, they were back and forth into directing and writing as well as acting. And he was a marmott, he said, to start with, actually. So they were both very artistic people. Yes, and struggling people as well. Your parents divorced, I think, when you were four years old and you were sent to a boarding school with your sister. So that's a young age to be sent away. Was that pretty tough? Yes, they separated when I was two and a half and then we were put into different places. One was in a boarding school and another place was at my grandmother's who separated my sister and I and I went to my aunt's house.

2:04So it's been a childhood that has been, you know, travelling and emotionally not knowing where I was belonging, you know, why I was there. And I think it helped me as an actress very much because it opens your heart in a way. It hurts, but at the same time you've got to find a way to survive inside you. And so I felt I was a joyful child. My way of surviving was playing and feeling joy. So I suffered, but also I was happy. Even though you weren't, I presume, seeing your parents very often then? Well, for a year, I didn't see them. I didn't see them at all. And when we were in boarding school, we saw them Saturday afternoon and Sunday.

2:45And so that was, they were probably rough years. But you know, children, they don't know that. They understand that later on. When you have your own children and you have to deal with it your whole life afterwards. What sort of cultural education did you get at school? Well, a normal one, let's say. But at the same time, I was educated by the passion of my parents, you know, going to the theatre as well as musicians or going to see films or reading plays during Christmas time. that we would spend two weeks in reading the whole Racine, the whole, you know, Chekhov. So there was a lot of culture around me because they were intellectually very high, especially my mother because she read so much and she was in that need of that passion of arts.

3:35And my father, because he was, you know, doing plays and they were touring. So there was, I would say it was chaotic, but it was rich. And did you say your father was a communist? Oh, yeah. So there was a political dimension to the upbringing as well. Yeah, and my mother was a feminist and ecologist in the 70s. So I was, you know, surrounded by the consciousness of what's happening in this world.

4:07On This Cultural Life, I ask my guests to choose the most important influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. And you've chosen a production of Alfred Jarry's play, Ubu Roi, which was directed by Peter Brook. And you saw this in Paris, I presume, when you were a teenager. I was probably 13 or 14. And I remember following this play and being mesmerised by it. And at the end of it all, I felt so much joy. watching it. I remember standing up. Everybody was standing up and applauding. And the joy I felt, if you can give that joy, I want to give it as well. You're really moved at the memory of that, aren't you?

4:58Yes, well, that's what actors do, is that they believe in what they say. It's like that. It's almost automatic. But there was this awareness of that. Oh, wow. I want to do that because it seems so direct. It's a direct emotion and it transforms you for your whole life. So that's why going to see, you know, arts is so important because it really can transform you inside. and it's not you intellectually deciding, it's your body that is taken and this concentration of something you receive, you can't really say what it is, but it feeds your soul, it feeds your life. And I felt like, well, I want to do that.

5:51We then present Ubu as a curious 19th century freak. We do it free of any cultural, historical, stylistic references, and I think most audiences, when we've played it in Germany or South America or here, take it as something direct that could have been thought up yesterday. It's a really interesting production, very bare set, minimal props. I think there was a drum kit on the stage. And the play, Ubu Roi, is a satire, interweaving some of Shakespeare's stories as well. There's a bit of Hamlet in there and Macbeth. What do you remember of the actual story and the production and the theme? What I remember of Jarry's play, first of all, is that your imagination really go strong when there's almost no object.

6:37You know, the set is not telling you where you are. You're just imagining. And in the play, it's just the freedom, you know, the tragedy and comedy altogether. This kind of existentialist kind of way of seeing life, you know, putting upside down what we think is bad and putting upside down what we think is good. Absurdity. Absurdity. And it makes you not only laugh, but it makes you a view of what it is to be a human being on that planet. So I like the fact that it was just pushing you to see things in a different way and making you laugh and cry together in a way. It's really interesting that you're moved by the memory of something which is absurd and it's a very funny play in many ways.

7:21It's not like you were talking about seeing, I don't know, Romeo and Juliet for the first time. and still being moved at the tragedy. So it's the experience of the theatre which moves you. Yes. And there was a special spirit in Peter Brook's plays, you know, and theatre. He created a place of... It was something else. It came almost from, instead of showing off something, it was like going down into something. And that's what I love about, somehow about acting myself, It's like the fact of not trying to pull it up to show it, you know, that I can do this, I can do that. I mean, the will kind of gear that I'm going to show how wonderful I am as an actress.

8:04It's more descending into a place where, OK, I need to be humble here first. Otherwise, it doesn't come towards you. There's something like that. You know, I get moved because it's like the movement you do in order to be transparent, in a way. Why does it move you so much? I don't know. I think I'm made like that. I'm made like that because it touches me. And I'm not controlling it. It's just happening. Probably it's when you open yourself. It's as simple as that. Get me in! You know, there is some film, we found it in the BBC archive. Yeah, just have a look at this clip here.

8:53Yeah, that's wonderful. Can you see? This is the animal. This is a bear, isn't it? Yeah, isn't that amazing? It's a rug which turns into a bear. Yeah, I love that.

9:14Yeah, it's full of imagination. Oh, he's been eaten for real.

9:21It's fun. They all have accents when they speak French, and I love that. You know, because it makes it... International. International. Yeah, and it was like a three-hour show or something. Thank you so much. That's so cool. It's great, isn't it? So seeing this production was a transformative moment. It made you think, I want to do that. So you decided to become an actor. How did you go about that? Well, I did because my mother was my theatre teacher and she was full of will, my mother, you know, doing exercises, you know, and it was wonderful. And then when I arrived in Paris, I was 15 with my sister.

10:04We lived together. And then at school I created a sort of a class because I did what my mother did. I directed two plays. And then seeing that I was the most passionate and I was like, I think probably terrible, you know, I was so passionate. I was very direct and probably too direct. And so when I was 18 then, my mother found a class for me where I met Vera Gregg.

10:34Your next choice for this cultural life is your acting teacher, Vera Gregg. What did she teach you? How did she teach you? Well, you know, when I entered her class, I was full of will. Talk about will. So she didn't allow me to go on stage to act for about three months. And it made me a little piste up because her class was very expensive. And, you know, I thought, what am I doing here if I'm not trying a scene? And so after three months, I was working on a scene of Alfred de Musée. And it was a big monologue scene. And after a while, she stopped me, like almost shouting at me, stop, stop. So I was a little surprised.

11:22And then she said to me, carry on. And so I started again. And she stopped me like several times until I was totally lost. And she was saying, stop acting. stop acting, and I didn't understand what she meant, because I was on stage, I'm supposed to act. And then after pushing me like that, because I was overwhelmed, she said to me, okay, start from there. And I was so lost, I didn't know what to do. And it was the acceptance of not knowing what to do that made me feel there's a difference between being and acting. and so it's always been a reference to me. The turning point of being lost is very important for an actor, not knowing.

12:12It's OK not to know. It will find its way. So when she was saying, stop, stop, stop acting, she was encouraging you to strip away your self-awareness? The knowledge I thought I had, the willingness to prove I was a good actress, to impress people. It was just a way to listen to myself somehow, to listen to what's in me. And when she said that and then you understood what she meant, did it change the way that you were performing? Oh, totally. Immediately? Not immediately because it was a big shock. but I remember the next day I came to the class and I thought, oh, I'm not going to be on stage for about three months because I've done my, you know, my explosion.

13:10It's going to take a while for me to go back on stage and actually when I arrived at the class, she said to me, Juliette, come on stage. and I thought I will never find this state, this place again because I was so frightened that it wouldn't come to me because it's about allowing the emotion to come to you and not you forcing it. And so she helped me recreate that because it's about, as actor, you have to recreate life. And it's very abstract, you know, because how do you compel? How do you put it together? so of course you have the lines to help you but you know where do you start in your being it's a big question and where do you what's the what's the technique that's the big question you've got to recreate life so you've got to blend those worlds together and in finding the need related to the story you're going to be telling and the need your own needs so you have to have a little of knowledge of yourself, then you're free in front of the screen and you're not trying to force it because you can see when the acting is forced and when it feels genuine and it feels spontaneous.

14:34Also what's very important is the leap of faith. The faith is what makes the difference. So you were taking classes at the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Paris. Afterwards, yes. Yeah, and then you left early, didn't you? You didn't finish your studies. Well, after Vera Gregg, I went to this national school and then it felt like everything was again, you know, about knowing how to do things and a way of acting. And I saw how fragile I could go back to it and forget the emotional side. They were saying that the emotion counts with the text itself. Suddenly, when it was too intellectual, it was cutting out from the emotional world.

15:23This is really interesting, though, because, I mean, many actors would say they are interpreting the words on the page and taking instructions from the director who's giving them... Yeah, but that's not enough. I'm sorry. For me, it doesn't reach me. So for you, the acting itself is a profound creative act? Absolutely. Otherwise, it's not worth it. Otherwise it becomes an intellectual medium. It becomes, you know, you say a text well and you understand all the layers intellectually, but it has to be an emotional experience as well. It needs to be human. It needs to be real in that realm because otherwise it's only one side, which is the close-up, you know.

16:10He won the whole body. Do you want to play? It's not that. What is it? Joseph.

16:23It's her. I don't know. After you left drama school, you started landing some early screen roles. One of the first ones was a part created for you by Jean-Luc Goddard in a film called Hail Mary in 1985. And, of course, he's very much a god of French cinema, one of the prime movers, the pioneers of the new wave, with films like Breathless, of course. So working with him, that experience, was that intimidating to work with somebody who was so revered at a young age? Yes, it was, but at the same time, he was not that reachable. And he would change his mind all the time on the set, or sometimes he would come on the set and then he didn't want to shoot, so we had to go back to our hotel.

17:06And we stayed there for months. But what I felt, he was respecting us because he was paying us quite well. Paying you? Yeah. And it meant a lot to me because I was living with my little roles, you know, how I could because I was not helped by my parents. So it meant a lot to me. And I felt, oh, he has respect in that way. It was not trying to be cheap. I presume that that style of acting that you developed at school and with Vera Gregg in particular, was with a kind of an eye on the stage primarily. Was it very different, the technique that you had to employ in front of the camera? What was different is that my acting teacher, Vera or Jean-Pierre, they were trying to help me.

17:53Jean-Luc Godard didn't try to help me at all. He was almost... Not that I had a lot of scene in the film, you know, I have very little scenes. But what I recall from working with him is that he was always trying to shift things so you wouldn't feel comfortable, so that you would feel a sort of malaise, not feeling at home. Was he like that with all of the actors? And I think that it was good because that's what he was trying with himself. He was trying to put a camera where it was not comfortable, but it was inventive, trying to find a place where the actor doesn't feel comfortable. Taking him out of your comfort zone.

18:35Exactly. And that was, for me, the big difference of learning, oh, all right, so no help from the director. I will come on set now, always prepared, not expecting anything from the director. all the actor, and knowing my shit and being responsible of, you know, I'm an actress and I know where I want to go with the piece I'm supposed to do.

19:08Your next choice for this programme is the experience of making Les Amants de Pont Neuf, which is a love story about two young people sleeping rough on the oldest bridge in Paris, and it's set in 1989 against the backdrop of the bicentennial celebrations that were going on in Paris, fireworks going off. There are orchestras in the city. Do you want to go to the Bastille? No, we're better here.

19:39A breakthrough role for you, playing one of the two lovers, playing actually a painter who's going blind in the story, you've made around 70 films in your career to date so why have you chosen this one? Well I was totally part of it because I was living with Léos Carax at the time and we had done... He was the director and writer? Yes, we had done The Night is Young, Les Mauvais Sans and so we were living together and as he was writing the script I was painting and drawing him so he included that role in sort of the story and I'm a painter in the story and we were doing it together and the production, it was two and a half years of trying to shoot it, first of all.

20:24It was a famously fraught production, wasn't it? I mean, as you say, it took years to make. I think at the time it became the most expensive French film ever made up to that point. It was expensive because the actor had cut his hand and so we had to postpone the shooting and make part of the bridge somewhere else. Yes, it was expensive, the most expensive. I don't know, because a lot of jealousy going on in France about this film, because it was a special film. And it's true that Léos is different from other directors. He's not trying to please everyone, to be accepted. He's his own person, and I love him for that.

21:10But as you say, you were living together at the time, and so you saw him developing the film. And you mentioned there that the character was a painter in the film because you were painting him when he was developing the script. So art has always been a passion for you as well. Was it ever a choice between the two at a young age? Yes, there was a time when I was like 13 and I was painting quite a lot and I loved it as well as I loved acting. I went to see an exhibition of my mother's friend, Charlotte Calmis, who was a painter, and I said to her, I don't know what to choose. Can you help me in that choice?

21:48And there was a poster of her exhibition and she said, why do you want to choose? And she wrote to continue everything and she signed. And I put that poster in my bedroom forever and it continued working on me and thinking, why do I need to choose? Just do everything you want to do in life. Life is generous go with your passion and and don't separate yourself into pieces and i felt very helpful in my life take us to the experience of the shoot itself there's a scene in the film when the two characters are in the seine they fall and they're looking at each other underwater it's said that you almost drowned shooting that i was shooting the swimming pool and i had 14 kilos around my waist and i had a wig on i had the coat on i had the you know all the shoes and and then I had to go down with the actor Denis Lavon and we had a scene to play and then we were going up and we had two scuba divers you know helping us to breathe in case we needed to have the the air coming as soon as possible and the sign in you know in the scuba diving world is like this like this is like not good hell come and help me and so first take we went down and I had no air because it was five meters, which was quite a lot.

23:06And I asked for the air and the air didn't come. I had no more air. And with the weight and the clothes and the five meters, I had to go up. I fought for my life. I felt like really that's the turning point, whether goodbye life or whether I was going to survive. And during that time, I really had a sort of a clear idea that I say yes to life forever. And the art will be second. Because I think inside of me there was a sort of a feeling that I'll give myself until the end to the art form. You know, give yourself as much, like a divine kind of need of surrounding. and so after I came out of the swimming pool trying to breathe and all, the first assistant came and said, well, we're going to do a second take without me because that was just crazy.

24:10But with Leos Carax, who you were working with, being directed by and living with, because there was a personal and professional relationship, did that make... I mean, that must have put a huge amount of pressure on the relationship itself, didn't it? Yeah, it did put a lot of pressure. I mean, we separated during the shooting. During? Oh, yeah, yeah. Nothing to do with that near-drowning experience? That had already happened, did it? There were, you know, things that separated us, but, I mean, it was part of it. And actually, you know, well, now with time past and all that, but he had written a scene of the end of this film at a time when I was doing a play, I was doing The Seagull, and he came with a new end that he showed me.

25:00I read the new end of the film, which was Denis Lavigne's character at the bridge and looking at the water 30 years after and thinking, has Michel loved me ever? And in that end, my character had died before in that drowning scene where, you know, you see in the film. And when I read the scene that the male character was doubting about the love of Michel, when I read that, I said to Léos, this is it, we're separating, goodbye. And I left. Because I found it so painful that he could think that, even though it was a fiction, even though it was written, but the echo of our lives was for me impossible.

25:54But he changed the ending. Then he changed the ending. That's what actors do. They make them change everything. And the ending is actually more ambiguous in a way because there's a suggestion that they carry on together. Yes. And yet you didn't carry on together with Léos. Well, shit happens. After Les Amants de Pont Neuf you went on to make Three Colours Blue with Krzysztof Kieslowski and you could have gone on in a very different direction I read that you were offered a role in Jurassic Park but turned it down to make the Three Colours films What's the most important factor for you when you are looking at potential roles?

26:37Is it the director? Is it the script? You can't divide it The two things come together? Of course, yeah So why not Jurassic Park? Because I was not playing a dinosaur, and that's what I said to Stephen. You had Steven Spielberg directing you, potentially, though. Yes, it's true, but I think I said yes to Blue before, and also I felt Blue was an exciting, deep story. It's a beautiful film, isn't it? Yes, it is. It's about a woman who has lost her husband. and he is a very famous composer, composing an anthem to celebrate European Union.

27:32It's a film very much about grief as well, isn't it? And how do you survive? And survival. Yeah. So with that, and you say it's about when you're choosing a role, it is about the script and the director, so in that case it was that story and it was Kislavski. It was the chance to work with him in particular. Oh, yes. Yes, because coming from the East before the war fell, he had different kinds of values that really made me think, like he would only do one take because he didn't have a lot of film. You know, it was expensive in his world for many years. He was Polish, wasn't he? Polish, yeah. And so I'd say, go ahead, we can do at least two, three, four, maybe seven.

28:22But he said, no, I don't need it. He was wonderful to work with, very easy to work with. And we had a great time. We were laughing, giggling all the time. And also he knew where to put the camera. You know, it was a very quick kind of shooting. and I was always asking for a second take because he wouldn't allow me, so I had to have deals with him, saying I had technical problems, that's why I needed a second take because he was allowing to do a second take when there was a sound problem or a camera problem, but not when the actor wanted to do another one. But maybe you were just nailing at first take every time.