Juliette Binoche

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

In the world of film, there are stars and there are acting talents. Stars in the field are typically high-profile actors. Despite more often than not proving to be enduring talents as performers in their careers over time, the stars' profile and name often threatens to supersede and clash with their talent throughout their tumultuous careers.

French actress Juliette Binoche, who despite winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the 1996 film The English Patient, has resisted breaking into the Hollywood scene and maintained her own path by choosing roles that challenge her as an actress.

Binoche now reunites with The English Patient director Anthony Minghella for the love-sick drama Breaking and Entering. In it, she plays Amira, a Bosnian migrant who crosses paths with a landscape architect played by Jude Law.

Binoche mentions that in preparing for the role of a Bosnian migrant, she was very interested in researching real-life Bosnian migrant experiences.

'Well, my first instinct was to go to Sarajevo and meet with women to understand what they went through during the war, before the war, and after the war,' she recalls, 'And I have to say that meeting mothers that have been through it for the whole going out experience was very traumatic most of the time.'

Another thing she notes is the immense difficulties that emerge in Bosnian migrants adapting to their new lives in England and France.

'Being inside was hard enough, but going out was even worse,' Binoche informs. 'And then arriving to the city, whether it was Paris or London, it's still a struggle. And so, ten years after, it's still a struggle, so it's like they're kind of sacrificing their lives for their children for their whole life to be better and maybe two or three generations.'

The script, which was written by director Anthony Minghella, was the first thing that attracted Binoche to the film.

'When I read the script, I was, of course, amazed because this is a mystery, I think, for a character or why do you belong to a story or why do you belong to a movie that's always a recognition of some kind of fate and unknown need,' she recollects. 'And of course, I read this script and the role'my grandmother was Polish and left the Second World War when my mother was one-year-old and her son was seven and she was a seamstress in Paris. And I know the struggle and she's been so courageous, so for me, it was vindication for her.'

Binoche says her reunion with the filmmaker was out of her praise for his continued skill.

'What I feel when I work with Anthony is that he doesn't know and that he allows himself not knowing, which is so refreshing because he allowed us to be and to give us something of a self that we don't know,' she explains. 'It's like a not-knowing-space on the set and then it becomes creative and a real collaboration because of that way of being, of listening, of looking. It's very specific with him and it doesn't happen very often.'

As the film's plot thickens, her and Jude Law's characters become entangled in a web of forbidden love and infidelity that neither of them are prepared for and want to do very much about. Binoche explains it's that complex grayness of human self-discovery that, for her, gives the character her weight.

'I think Amira and any kind of woman wouldn't lie to her and anyone,' Binoche states, 'And at the same time, you want to live your life with your hopes. So it's very complex, because from an outsider point-of-view, it can be seen as bad. But when you're inside, you have another perspective. It's about surviving, it's about knowing the other, and so that's why they're facing one another. And that's why it's so powerful.'

She goes on to note why it was important to play a character that tackled such a gray area like adultery.

'Sometimes love survives versus moral ideas we have and we're taken in by love and we don't know why,' Binoche explains, 'But it's as if we don't live love, it feels like we're not being human. So I mean, it's very complex and that's what I love about this film is because it shows the complexity of our souls, our going back and forth, our search, and sometimes, the way we destroy things because it's unbearable and we have other aims.'

With this film, as with all of her films, acting for Juliette Binoche is all about the experience and what you learn as you progress from film to film.

'As an actor, it's always a transformation journey because first of all, you have to come without knowing and trying to empty yourself in order to receive,' Binoche notes, 'Because I had been through the South African experience of trying to understand what they went through and there, it was another one.'

And for Binoche, Breaking And Entering was indeed a full-bodied experience.

'It was for me, even though it was not a documentary, but it has to have some kind of reality that was so truthful and so intimate, so that was my search mainly,' she says spiritedly, 'Of course, the simplicity of the life, the quote that it meant nothing, and there was no glamorous outside things. It was about how do I survive in this world and then, all of a sudden, meeting this amazing love and destroying it. So that was mainly my journey and it was difficult, but it was worth it.'