Her portayal of the beautiful, compassionate nurse in The English Patient woke americans up to her talent. But when Juliette Binoche won her surprise Oscar in front of a billion viewers, the whole world fell in love with her.
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Juliette Binoche opens the door to her country house about an hour outside of Paris with a big smile. "Bonjoar" she says. "Bonjoar," I answer, annoyed that I am using one of the three French words I know so early in the interview.
"Thank you so much for coming to Paris to do this," she says, extending her hand. Binoche is so petite I expect a delicate little handshake, but hers is so strong it nearly pulls me over the threshold. When I regain my balance, I smile and say, "I would come to Paris to interview anyone whose name I can pronounce." She isn't quite sure if I'm kidding.
Until six or seven months ago, Juliette Binoche was basically unknown to American audiences. She had played Tereza, Daniel Day-Lewis's beautiful, unsophisticated wife in Philip Kaufman's 1988 film T_he Unbearable Lightness of Being_. She'd played Anna Barton, Jeremy Irons's future-daughter-in-law/mistress in Louis Malle's Damage. And she'd played the young woman who's lost her husband and child in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue. But she was probably more famous for her Lancome ads than she was for her films. Then, as the wonderful nurse Hana in The English Patient, she suddenly began to garner lots of attention, and when she stepped up to accept her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress last spring, she captured hearts all over America and around the globe.
You remember. Everyone in the audience at the Shrine Auditorium knew Lauren Bacall was going to win, including Lauren Bacall. But then presenter Kevin Spacey announced Binoche's name. When Binoche went up to the stage in her garnet velvet Sophie Sitbon gown, with her hair looking as if her lover had just been running his hands through it for hours, she was so obviously surprised and joyous she brought the whole evening back to the high point Cuba Gooding Jr. had earlier given it.
The living room of Binoche's mid-19th-century house, where she lives with her nearly four-year-old son, Raphael, has comfortably worn maroon and cobalt-blue velvet sofas scattered about, and little tables piled high with books. This is a room people actually live in--a concept so different from the done-to-the-max Hollywood homes I usually see that I am momentarily speechless. Binoche gets us both glasses of juice and plops down on one of the couches.
"Are you enjoying yourself in Paris?" she asks.
"How can you not?" I say. "Everyone at my hotel is bowing and scraping, saying, 'Is there anything I can get you, Ms. Frankel?' 'Is your room OK, Ms. Frankel?' 'Would you like some wine, Ms. Frankel?' I was wondering where all the supposedly rude Parisians had gone. But then they handed me a fax about my interview, and I realized they were being sweet to me because of you!"
Binoche throws her head back and laughs a laugh so raucous and unexpected that I laugh, too. It's a sound you would expect from a trucker with a beer belly, a deep infectious guffaw. "You got here at the right time," she says. "It took me some time to be accepted, but now, especially since I got my Oscar, it's like I'm the Queen of France for a little while."
Just for the record, Binoche's slow rise to stardom in her own country may have something to do with the film she made in the early '90s with French director Leos Carax (her lover at the time), L_es Amants du Pont-Neuf_. The project took three years to finish, and was one of the most expensive films in French history. It featured Binoche as a homeless woman with an eyepatch (which is like having Sharon Stone wear a false nose and mustache), and was a colossal bomb. In fact, Les Amants was the French Heaven's Gate (or perhaps, even worse, the Gallic Hudson Hawk).
"Where is your Oscar?" I ask, wondering if people carry them around for awhile until the novelty wears off.
Binoche points her finger in the air. "It's upstairs somewhere. In a corner. I don't want to be reminded every day."
"So tell me, even though everyone's convinced you were winging it up there, what was written on the little piece of paper in your purse?"
"I was sure that Lauren Bacall would win," she responds. "I wasn't prepared, and that was the best preparation. I looked around for Lauren Bacall, and if I had seen her, I would have handed the Oscar to her."
Can you imagine? Would Bacall have kept it? If I had any doubts before, this convinces me that Binoche is definitely not an American.
"The thing that was so special about the Oscar," Binoche continues, "was the feeling that I was being adopted by another family, the Americans. That was the most moving thing."
I can tell Binoche hasn't studied up on the fate of Oscar winners in her category. But it's no wonder she looks to re-create a family wherever she can. She was four when her parents, both struggling actors, separated, and sent her and her sister to a Catholic boarding school. Although Binoche has said that her years at school were relatively good, her whole demeanor changes when she talks about it. "I understand what my parents did," she says, "although I couldn't for the life of me imagine sending Raphael away now. But I'm lucky--I have work and some money. My parents had neither."
"You're so much not a Hollywood actress," I say. "I can't imagine what they'll do with you there."
"But I am here," she says, pointing out the obvious. "I can come back here and work, or go somewhere else and work, and Hollywood is not even on my mind. Maybe because I don't live there, but not every decision I make is about the movies. I am not part of the game. It's a funny place, no?"
"Oh yes, absolutely. Weren't the Academy Awards funny enough for you?"
"I had never been there before. I thought it would be so tacky. But all in all, I loved the Oscars, and I would say that even if I hadn't won."
"Do you feel the same way about Los Angeles?"
"Whenever I go to California," Binoche says, "I feel a little unsure. Because I was there for the big earthquake. I was at the Four Seasons Hotel. It was frightening because I had my child with me. He was five months old, and I had been up for 24 hours traveling. On the plane, Raphael wanted to do anything but sleep, so I didn't sleep. [At the hotel] I slept for two hours, and then the friend who was with me said, 'You should wake up and feed him because I think he's hungry.' So I tried to feed him, but no way he wanted to have anything. He was still crying, and then it began. I didn't know what was happening. I didn't know whether it was an inside feeling or an outside feeling, because I was so exhausted. When I realized that it was an earthquake, I grabbed my baby and we went into a doorway. After the earthquake, my child just went to sleep and he didn't stop sleeping for hours and hours. And I started not wanting to sleep at all."
"Yup, that's California, all right," I say. "You know, the actor Tim Robbins was in the Four Seasons during the earthquake, too ..."
"How do you know this?" Binoche asks, as if I'd just been caught in bed with him.
"Because he told me," I say, perhaps a bit too defensively.
"Oh, well, I love him," says Binoche. "And Susan Sarandon."
"Are they actors you'd like to work with?"
Binoche nods with no hesitation.
"Funny," I tell her, "That's exactly how I felt, until I actually interviewed them."
Now Binoche definitely thinks I'm kidding--who would dare disparage the darlings of American cinema?
"I think of _The English Patient _as two movies," I tell her, changing the subject. "One part has Ralph Fiennes as a bully who's in love with Kristin Scott Thomas. That one takes place in the desert and it's all golds and reds. I hated that movie. But then there's the movie you're in, which takes place in Italy, and it's pale whites and blues, and Ralph Fiennes is now a nice guy, even though he's burned beyond recognition and dying. I loved that movie, and I was totally annoyed when they kept going back to the desert. And trust me, if I was dying, I'd want you to be my nurse, too ..."
"I would want Hana, also," says Binoche, letting loose with one of her howls. "I feel bad that you didn't like the other part of the film . .. But Hana was a character that was just so right for me. She can be very warm, very afraid, very serious. But also she has this happiness that I just loved."
"Not too many of the characters you've played have been happy. I'm thinking of Anna Barton in Damage, who caused an accidental death and a spiritual suicide, or the woman who loses her husband and child in Blue, or Tereza in Unbearable Lightness, who's tortured by her husband's infidelity while the Russians crush Czechoslovakia's hopes of freedom ..."
"But I am not like that," Binoche says. "For me, my characters are people who are on a journey. You have to go through something to get to something great, right? Just because my characters feel pain doesn't mean that my life is a mess. Sometimes people confuse that."
Isn't this great? In America, actors try to convince us that they're a lot more serious than we think they are. Here, they try to do just the opposite.
"What roles have you turned down in the movies?" I ask.
"It's not that I turn down roles--for me, it's like I choose others."
Binoche is definitely doing doublespeak, but with her beautiful accent, it's hard to get annoyed. "But you were offered the role Laura Dem played in Jurassic Park, right?"
Binoche nods. "But then I decided to do Blue." And since Jurassic Park was one of the biggest grossing movies ever, and only 13 people ever saw Blue, you can see right away that she did the smart thing.
"I can see that look you're giving to yourself," Binoche says, catching me. "What I'm saying is that if I had been free, I probably would have done it."
"When they were looking around for someone to play Sabrina, you would have been perfect. You are the closest thing we have to Audrey Hepburn..."
"I made the test for it," Binoche says in a barely audible whimper. "I wanted it so badly. But I think now that nobody could have made that movie good."
"You did? You would've been so good."
"Don't tell me that, and don't tell them that."
"You got fired from a film last year," I say. "It was something Claude Berri was directing. Not that any of us know who Claude Berri is, but what happened?"
"Really? You don't know his work? He did ..."
I wave her off. I loved Jean de Florette too, but what I want to know is why Berri fired her.
"Well," she says, "Even the first day, there was a feeling of anger on the set. I didn't understand. It wasn't the right spirit for the film. The director didn't want to hear what I had to say. And that, for me, makes a very unhappy experience. When you've had experiences like I did with Anthony Minghella [on The English Patient] or with Krzysztof Kieslowski [on Blue] you cannot go back to this world of 'I'm the boss and you shut your mouth.' Berri couldn't bear to hear what I had to say.
"Are you hungry?" she asks me, shifting gears. "Should I make you something to eat?"
"Hors d'oeuvres?" I ask, that being the second of the three words I know in French.
"No," she says seriously, "I thought we should eat a good meal." I follow her into the kitchen, where a large wood table dominates the room. She opens the refrigerator and takes out a roasted chicken, which she proceeds to cut up and put in a pot, adding a bowl of carrots and peas. While that simmers, she cuts an avocado in half, pours balsamic vinegar into the wells, and hands one half to me. Then she takes out a plate of tomatoes, mozzarella, basil and olives, and sets that down, too.
"Nobody I've interviewed has ever made me lunch before," I tell her.
"Is that true?" she asks, dead surprised. "Don't you eat with them?"
"Yes, but it's always catered or we're in a restaurant."
"I hope you don't mind this ..."
The food is fabulous. And Binoche isn't one of those waifs who just picks at her food. Although she looks like she barely weighs a hundred pounds, she eats ravenously. When the chicken is heated, she puts the pot on the table, ladles out two pieces for each of us, and eats that, too. Then she uses the back of her hand to wipe her mouth.
"When you were a kid, did you look like this? Were you pretty then?"
"I wasn't conscious of how I looked."
"That means you were pretty. Because if you were ugly, you would've known. When you go to a party, do you gravitate towards the men or towards the women?"
"Towards the light," Binoche says with a giggle.
"Do you know who runs the big studios in Hollywood? Or care?"
"No. I met a few of them, but I wouldn't remember the names. Also they're changing all the time, I heard."
"What's the best lie you've ever been told in Hollywood?"
"The best line?" Binoche asks.
"No, the best lie. You know, like, 'We won't use the nude scene unless you approve it.'"
"Lie, line, they have about the same meaning in Hollywood, no? But the best lie is probably, Juliette, you're the greatest.'"
"Do you like to gossip with your friends?"
"Is that what we're doing here?" Binoche asks suspiciously.
"No, this is called talking."
"I hate gossip," says Binoche. "Do you gossip?"
"Juliette, in America gossip is a national pastime. Of course I gossip with my friends. It's not like the French don't."
"Maybe they do, but not me. I don't understand it. People want to know the most intimate things. Why?"
"Perhaps they think your life is more interesting than theirs."
Binoche thinks I'm kidding.
"When you made The Horseman on the Roof, you fell in love with your costar, Olivier Martinez. Does he live here with you?"
Binoche gives a tiny shake to her head, which seems to be friendly Parisian for "Don't even think about going there." She is notoriously private, but it's rumored that Olivier moved into this house with her last spring. And when the front door opened, I caught a glimpse of the back of a man who certainly could have been Martinez. Martinez is not the father of Binoche's son--that man is a professional scuba diver named Andre Halle, and I'm sure Binoche is not going to talk about him, either. And she's definitely not going to speak about Daniel Day-Lewis, who was reportedly her lover during the making of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
"Let's talk about Damage," I say, bringing up the movie that Binoche did with Jeremy Irons, who I can only hope was not her lover. "That was an incredible book about obsession, but I think it got ruined as a film."
"As a lot of people know, I wasn't very happy shooting that movie," she says. "It was a difficult film to make. Jeremy and I had wonderful conversations--I find him very intelligent--but it was difficult to work with him on the set. And I'm not hiding it, because that's what I feel. At the same time, I don't want to judge it, because you have to allow people to be different, and it doesn't mean that he's like that now."
"What about the sex in Damage? The movie was supposed to be sexy, but there was that scene where he's banging your head on the floor. . . and you kept doing it standing up. I've tried that in real life, and it doesn't work too well."
Binoche laughs. "I think Louis Malle had a different vision for the film than I did. But what can I do now?"
I am hesitating at the thought of bringing up Binoche's film Blue because I always have such an emotional reaction even to thinking about it. It's about a woman overcoming a painful catastrophe and then finding out an absolutely disillusioning secret and dealing with that and becoming an amazing, loving person. I cried my eyes out when I saw it and now I can feel my throat tightening.
"In Blue, you play a woman who loses her husband and her child in a car accident, and then, afterwards, finds out that her husband was not the man she thought he was ..."
Right at this point, I'm not kidding, I burst into tears! I am completely flustered. Binoche stops, the food in her mouth unchewed, while she takes all this in.
"Are you OK?" she finally asks.
"Yes, fine," I say. It's pretty apparent that I'm not. "It's just that movie really struck a chord in me. I'm so sorry." Tears are spilling onto the table. My nose is running.
Binoche just smiles and rubs my hand. "It's OK," she says. "Even better than OK. For a movie to make someone feel so much is a wonderful thing for an actor to hear."
God, no wonder she got cast as Hana.
"Kieslowski was a great man," Binoche continues, speaking of the director who died last year. "He had the capacity to make pictures that talked about more than just the story. Blue was one of the happiest experiences I ever had, because he knew how to communicate. You never had to guess. Almost everything in that film was done in one take. I'd ask a question, he'd say yes or no, and that was it--I understood completely. When he died my heart broke. That man could really make you cry."
Binoche stops, afraid she's making everything worse. But I've finally pulled myself together.
"With your Oscar," I say, "you're going to be offered a lot more American films, don't you think?"
"I'm not sure. You never know how that will happen. I will look at each thing separately. I know definitely when I can do something and when I can't."
"What can't you do?"
"Wuthering Heights I think I can't do," Binoche says with a laugh.
She is referring to a film that she did, indeed, do. The 1992 remake of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, which starred Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliff--a role that reportedly brought him to Steven Spielberg's attention and got him cast in Schindler's List--was a dismal commercial failure.
"I think if Jane Campion had directed it," says Binoche, "it would've been quite different." Yeah, and the only role Fiennes would have gotten after that would have been the one in Strange Days.
"As a spokesperson for Lancome's perfume, Poeme, you've said you believe Rimbaud is a great poet. What exactly is great about him?"
"The thing about Rimbaud," she says, as if he really does have anything to do with Lancome or any perfume, "is that he is clear about things. By that I mean that he is someone you can see through..."
Hmmmmm. Binoche has a flawless command of English, so I have to consider this carefully.
"He knows more than the others, he knows without knowing. I think he is that kind of writer."
For the first time, I think something may have been lost in the translation.
"You debated whether to be a painter or an actor. Do you still paint? What kinds of things?"
"Wait, I'll show you some." Binoche goes upstairs and returns with a handful of black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings. They are pictures from the set of The English Patient. There's one of Ralph Fiennes lying on the bed in the hospital covered in gauze. A few are of the scene when they take the patient out into the rain. All of them are remarkable.
"It's funny--you had to spend the whole of The English Patient looking at that icky, gooey, misshapen talking head ..."
"Oh no, not at all. I had a great time with Ralph. I tried to make him laugh all the time, which he couldn't, because of all the makeup. I got so used to seeing him like that, with all the bandages and things, that it felt right to me."
"So," I say, looking over the drawings, "you're gorgeous, you can eat whatever you want and not gain an ounce, and you're talented in all kinds of things."
Binoche stares at the pictures, too, as if trying to see where I am getting all this information.
"I recently did this story with David Duchovny," I say, "and I was telling him that I play poker and that one of my little tricks is to make myself blush, because it makes the other players think I'm lying. And he said, 'You know, I never realized that people could blush on command until I saw Juliette Binoche in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. There's a scene in that film where she sleeps with someone and she's shy and embarrassed, and you can actually see the blush creeping into her cheeks. And I love that scene so much that I now call blushing Binoching."
Binoche laughs. "That's so funny. When I first met Kieslowski, he mentioned that scene to me. And I went back to watch it. Because mostly I see the film once, and it's enough for me. I turn the page and make another movie. But I saw Unbearable Lightness again because he wanted me to blush in Blue."
"He wanted you to Binoche ..."
"Yes, exactly. We made one minute of the scene, and I was trying to blush and I couldn't! He was getting mad, telling me how to blush. But you know what was so good about Unbearable Lightness? It was the makeup artist. She knew not to put makeup on me. And that's why you can really see what's happening with my face. In the old days, they had those big lights, and the women wore lots of makeup, and they looked like flowers. Now it's different because the quality of the film is so precise that you see everything. So when I did that blushing, you could see it. I blush easily, as I laugh easily, I cry easily, it all happens very quickly. But I could never blush for Kieslowski. They must have had too much makeup on me. But let me ask you something--Who is this David Duchovny? Is he that Swedish actor? Oh, no--he's a journalist, right? Or is he the man who ..."
I stop her before she starts guessing butcher, baker, candlestick maker. "He's the star of The X-Files." She looks even more bewildered.
"It's a television show..."
She nods. "Oh, now I understand," although I doubt that she does. "Are you still hungry?" she asks. "Do you want dessert?"
"No," I say. "Merci (my third, and last, French word). I guess I'll be going now. Unless you want me to do the dishes ..."
"Really?" asks Binoche, her eyes widening. "They make you do that?" I leave her shaking her head, wondering whether "they" do or not.
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Martha Frankel interviewed Jeremy Northam for the July '97 issue of Movieline.