Hephzibah Anderson talks to Juliette Binoche

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Yet this is Binoche as you'll never have seen her before - in mutedwatercolour rather than luminous celluloid, and painted in her ownhand. What makes it such an unusual self-portrait is that she hassought to capture her features in character - playing Hana thenurse, her Oscar-winning role in Anthony Minghella's The EnglishPatient. The result is a curious mix of emotional candour andconceptual cunning. 'It's painful to separate from a movie at theend of the shoot,' she explains. 'The self-portraits are a way ofkeeping up with this mysterious encounter that a character canbring out in you.'
France's highest-paid actress is set to reveal several more unseensides of herself this autumn, when a BFI Southbank retrospective,entitled Jubilations, will coincide with the premiere of In-I, adance work co-created with her co-performer, London-bornchoreographer Akram Khan. Additionally, the BFI atrium will beshowcasing Binoche's paintings of directors with whom she hasworked and of herself in character.
As if that weren't achievement enough for one woman, a bilingualbook will be published at the same time, composed not only ofpaintings, but also poems she has written about some of those samedirectors. And all of this after having just released five films in10 months.
Binoche is a contradictory character. She is a supremely seriousactress who has worked with the likes of Jean-Luc Godard andAndré Téchiné, yet also made Hollywood moviessuch as Dan in Real Life, which saw her play Steve Carell'sexasperatingly blithe love interest last year. Renowned for herfull-frontal soul-baring, she has created cinematic moments so rawthat the viewer almost wants to look away. Remember that scene atthe start of Three Colours: Blue? She has survived the car crashthat killed her husband and young daughter, and as she receives thenews, we're brought so close to her beat-up face on its crumpledhospital pillow that we can almost feel her ragged breath stir theair around us. At the same time, she guards her off-camera privatelife with notorious intensity. In person, she is aporcelain-skinned miniature of the heroines with whom she's madeher name, but when she laughs, it's the laugh of a far larger woman- a saucy, throaty cackle that bubbles up from deep in the stomachand erupts with shoulder-shaking, throw-your-head-back glee.
She laughs that laugh in her two latest films, both releasedearlier this month. Olivier Assayas's Summer Hours sees her playone of three adult siblings whose mother suddenly dies, leavingthem with a fine 19th-century art collection to dispose of. InCédric Klapisch's Paris - a superior Love Actually - she isa single mother (again), harried social worker and sister to aseriously ill man. There is nothing risky about these roles, butthat isn't to say Binoche has abandoned the career thrill-seekingthat led her to work alongside the likes of Taiwanese director HouHsiao- Hsien (and turn down Steven Spielberg); she has merely founda new outlet.
It was while filming Minghella's Breaking and Entering in London,in 2006, that her shiatsu masseuse, a friend of Khan's, asked herif she wanted to learn to dance. Binoche did, and loved what she'dseen of Khan's work. Her masseuse introduced them and they spentthree days working in his studio. Was it chance, I suggest.'Intuition,' she prefers. 'I see life as being a movement in youthat has a certain certainty, but you can't hang on. It's like ahealthy earth, you've got to put air in it, you've got to askquestions and move it in order not to become stuck in yourthinking.'
Binoche has no real dancing experience. In Klapisch's Paris, sheperforms an ironic, hip-shimmying striptease in one scene, but inanother she is a wallflower who has to be dragged on to thedancefloor. For his part, Khan was cast in Peter Brook'sMahabharata when he was just 14, and has collaborated with everyonefrom Nitin Sawhney and Antony Gormley to Kylie Minogue. WithBinoche, he began by having her shadow his movements, but on themorning of day two, the actress announced to the choreographer thatshe wanted to do something different. 'I told him I wanted toexplore from nothing,' she says, and so was born the project thathas become In-I.
The pair got to know each other through dance, an uncomfortablyintimate intimacy, you'd have thought. 'I'm used to it,' shebreezes. 'In film, we have to get intimate very quickly. You'reshowing your soul - you have to get naked, sometimes physically butmostly emotionally. Dancers don't really get involved emotionallythat much, because it would be too much - they're so closephysically all the time, the body becomes like a tool.' She andKhan, she says, are aiming for both kinds of closeness. 'To putemotion and body together - it's a weird experience because it's avery intimate relationship.' Throw in a set designed by AnishKapoor and it sounds as if they'll have the audience swooning. Theshow will also include snatches of text, written in English byBinoche and Khan. 'I'm going to be acting what I wrote, isn't thatcrazy? To be responsible for the meaning of it all... As anactress, there's a place where you think, "Well, it's his film" -you don't take responsibility in the same way.'
Due to open in September with a six-week stretch at the NationalTheatre, the project will be on tour for almost a full year, withdates in Sydney, Tokyo, Abu Dhabi and Paris. This hectic itinerarywill spin to a halt in September 2009 in Brooklyn, allowing Binochetime to make just one film, by Abbas Kiarostami in Italy.
She has lost weight during rehearsals, and the actress sat acrossthe table from me, in the shade to ease a headache but framed bythe unexpected loveliness of a summer's day on the South Bank, is ashadow of the almost matronly figure she cut in Michael Haneke'sHidden a couple of years ago. Dressed in torn jeans, Birkenstocksand a creamy linen tunic edged with embroidery, she has a new-foundwiry strength thanks to the dancing. It's all about stamina, sheexplains.
With three months of rehearsals behind them and just one more togo, both she and Khan are cagey about the programme's content,though they admit to the craziness of their joint endeavour.
There will be improvisational elements but Binoche initiallystruggled with the necessarily choreographed element. 'I'm not usedto that kind of language. I like my freedom as an artist, andwithin the words of a script I always find a way to be free.Where's my freedom if there's a moment when I have to followAkram's dance?'
Of all the directors she has encountered, Binoche describesTaiwanese Hou Hsiao-Hsien, with whom she worked on last year'sFlight of the Red Balloon, as being the most significant to herdevelopment as an actress. 'He gave me so much freedom that Ineeded to be even more creative, because there was no set-up, nolines, it was just an improvisation on the moment. When you start,you think it's the directors who are the ones making the decisions,but for Hou Hsiao-Hsien it doesn't happen like this, it's shaped bythose he's working with, or by the sky, the cars, the birds cominginto shot. Suddenly you see creation in a different way. WithMichael Haneke I'd say it's the opposite - it's intense energydetermined by a decision he made on his own in his little house inAustria.'
Unsurprisingly, she describes her training at Paris' elitistNational Conservatory of Dramatic Arts as painful - 'Painful in thesense that it was too rigid for me. I was already an independentatom.' When I ask her if she has any plans to step behind thecamera, she brushes off the question as if it were immaterial. 'Thecollaboration is so close with some directors that I feel like eventhough I'm not in the editing room, I'm in the middle of it, I'mproposing things.' This wilfulness has not always gone down well.Claude Berri, for instance, replaced her in the title role of LucieAubrac after she reportedly queried some of the character's lines.
Binoche's parents were both in the business and one of her firstmemories is of being taken backstage at a production of Romeo andJuliet. She was two years old and overwhelmed by the smell of thecorridors, the intimacy of the dressing rooms, the enormity of theproportions. Torn between painting and acting, she made herdecision aged 17, when she directed and played in a production ofIonesco's Le Roi Se Meurt, though she still paints whenever shecan.
The self-portraits that will go on show alongside her BFIretrospective capture a part of the shooting experience that isn'tpreserved in the finished film, she says, adding that eachcharacter spontaneously demands her own style. 'I wrote the poemsbecause I wanted to write letters to the directors - I wanted toleave a trace of what had happened.'
Here she is on Minghella and the making of The English Patient, forinstance: 'Searching in the battle of being/We attempted to glimpsethe other side/Dance took us in its arms/Bliss of green nature inthe land of oil and vine.' It's the impressionistic style thatpoetry permits that appeals to her. 'I think in acting it's thatalso - what can be said is between the words.' When she reads ascript, the response she is waiting for is purely emotional. 'Ineed to feel at the end that, "Aaaargh! I want to do it!"'Actually, she doesn't say 'want to' but 'wanna', a word thatpeppers her American-English, barely accented yet brushed with adistinctively Parisian hauteur.
The BFI retrospective is not Binoche's first - that was in LaRochelle five years ago. It was an enlightening experience, shesays, albeit a touch disturbing. 'I thought they were like sisters,the characters I played. I always saw them as that, but actually,when I saw the films again, I thought, "They're not sisters at all,they're totally different!" You remember them one way but filmschange because you change.'
At 44, unmarried but with a son by scuba diver André Halleand a daughter by actor Benoît Magimel, Binoche seems to haveattained a liberating kind of self-acceptance that can only bedescribed as wisdom. Her relationship with success, for instance,is unabashed. 'I embrace it, because it's a sign of outsiderecognition. It's not about you personally, but allowing it to comethrough you is a very touching thing. It gives you a sort ofhumility. If you take it personally it's another story - then youneed more and more and more and it's never enough.' Last year, sheeven posed for French Playboy, though she initially refused to donude shots and later agreed only if they were suitably abstracted.At the shoot, she disrobed and danced.
'It's not that I'm taking more risks but I'm less fearful,' shetells me. 'I stopped being the nice little obedient girl. When Istarted as an actress, I wanted to please so much. I think we allneed to be loved. When we fail, we're very, very hurt and behave insuch a way that nobody is going to love us. There's a moment whenyou're jumping into the trust and you don't know if you'll be lovedor not. You've got to dare to allow for not being loved - if youdon't dare that, you're not an artist.' She brings it swinging backround to acting, but for a moment, it feels like we aren'tdiscussing that at all. Earlier this year, Parisian tittle-tattlewent into overdrive at the suggestion that Binoche might have beenleft by Santiago Amigorena, the Argentinean screenwriter with whomshe's been romantically linked since 2006.
'I don't speak about my private life. I'm very intimate in my wayof working, and I reveal a lot in me in films, so I don't need toreveal my private life because I'm giving enough. I give so much onscreen I can't give everything to the public. I'm very good atbeing the keeper of my privacy.'
There are other things she doesn't really want to talk about. Shedoesn't want to talk about the dwindling supply of roles for womenover 40. When it comes to future ambitions, she says, gnomically,'I am in the moment.' There is something profoundly Gallic aboutthe way she shrugs off questions, picking at a bunch of purplegrapes and tossing her tousled, chin-length auburn curls, but shewon't talk about the secrets of French womanhood, either, despitehaving enacted the Anglo fantasy in countless English-speakingroles. 'I don't know - I think we're all different and specialand...' she trails off into the abstract.
Such a response might come across as sulkiness in another, but,coming from Binoche, it's tinged with something wounded, painedalmost. It's there when she talks about the challenges of combiningsingle motherhood with a career, for instance. 'I'm trying my best,I'm really trying my best,' she says with a sigh, tapping the samehinted-at reservoir of suffering that lends the might to her mostpowerful performances, and which gives her uproarious cackle of alaugh its depth, making it feel like something to hold the viewerat a distance, even as it draws you in.
Trying to pin down the nature of her own life's role, she comes upwith the analogy of actors as therapists. 'We help people healthemselves, think about themselves, get their emotions back intothem,' she says. 'It's the connection between your body and yourheart. You've got to make a connection - some people aredisconnected, or else between their head and their body there's nota heart. By subliming life into film, we actors condense all thequestions that a human being can go through.'
It's a theory that neatly ties up her retrospective with her newdeparture as a dancer, but Binoche's power as an actress rests inthe spaces between the lines, between the movements that Khan haschoreographed for her, and between her own brush strokes. For allthat she strips down emotionally on screen, it's what remainshidden and unvoiced that is most compelling - that corner of herself she guards so fiercely, even as the camera zooms in.
· The BFI's Juliette Binoche season, Jubilations, runs from 1September to 5 October, details at bfi.org.uk . Summer Hours and Paris are both in cinemas now. In-I opens at theNational Theatre on 6 September The best of Binoche on screen
Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991)
Binoche won her first European Film Award for her role asMichèle, a vagrant artist losing her sight in thisswooningly romantic concoction from Leos Carax. She ends up livingon Paris's oldest standing bridge, the Pont Neuf, and in love withAlex, a street performer who tries to prevent Michèle'sfamily from tracking her down.
Three Colours: Blue (1993)
Her sombre performance in Krzysztof Kieslowski's masterpiece, thefirst of his Three Colours trilogy, won Binoche her firstCésar award and a Golden Globe nomination. She plays Julie,the wife of a famous composer who is trying to piece her life backtogether after surviving a car crash that kills her husband andtheir only child.
The English Patient (1996)
In Anthony Minghella's hugely successful adaptation of the MichaelOndaatje novel, Binoche plays Hana, the French-Canadian nurse whotends to the patient of the title (Ralph Fiennes) in a ruinedItalian villa during the Second World War. She took home one of thefilm's nine Oscars, for Best Supporting Actress.
Chocolat (2000)
Vianne is a free-spirited chocolatier who seduces an uptight Frenchtown - and Johnny Depp - with her creations. The critics weren'tentirely won over by Lasse Hallström's sentimental movie butBinoche received her third European Film Award for it, and a BestActress nomination at the Oscars.
Hidden (2005)
Binoche played a more central part in her first Michael Hanekefilm, Code Unknown, in 2000, but she was excellent in Haneke'saward-winning Hidden as Anne, a Parisian publisher whosebroadcaster husband starts receiving disturbing videotapescontaining surveillance footage of their home. She received aEuropean Film Award nomination for her role.
Paris (2008)
Romain Duris, a young dancer suffering from heart disease, tiestogether the diverse stories in this sentimental ensemble piececelebrating the French capital. Binoche plays his unmarried sisterwho moves in with her three children to care for him and isreawakened to the possibility of finding love.