No Faking

"It's called Words & Pictures, and, honestly, I think my pictures are better than my words!” says Juliette Binoche, with a howling laugh. The fiery 50-year-old – who's won Best Actress awards at Berlin, Cannes, Venice, and the Oscars – is currently on screens in Gareth Edwards' blockbuster Godzilla, but is talking about her work in Fred Schepisi's latest, in which she spent more time on her character's paintings than her accent.

Offscreen, Binoche is a painter; and, in Words & Pictures she plays one. This meant that pre-production involved not just line-learning, but a desperate rush to of paint an entire career's worth of canvases in two weeks. “I made them push the date of a few scenes, because I felt like, 'No! I don't have your fucking paintings! I need some more time!'” Binoche laughs. “It was crazy: as much as I was putting into the acting, I had to put into the painting. I couldn't be me, Juliette, I had to paint as if I was her. And my character has rheumatoid arthritis, so I had to paint not just as if I was another person, [but as] another person who was in pain.”

Binoche impressed playing another artist in Bruno Dumont's harrowing Camille Claudel 1915, which chronicles the tragic sculptor's “imprisonment” in a rural asylum. Dumont based his film entirely on Claudel's journals, out to “bring justice” to a woman martyred by the patriarchy. “She was abandoned and forgotten in that place,” Binoche spits. “She was sacrificed. In the encyclopaedia at the time, she was listed as being dead; they gave the date of her death when she was still living!” Binoche had a poster of Claudel on her wall as a teenager, and idolised her (“When you have a strong artist with that much fire, you can really relate to them”). On set, she clashed with Dumont, and spent the first few weeks in tears. “It has to resonate within yourself, you have to feel it, otherwise it's not acting. It's faking. It's representing. I'm not representing Camille, I have to live her. That's the curse of [acting]. You're so privileged, but there's that curse that comes with it. You have to accept the descending, and know that you're doing it for a higher purpose.”

Binoche and Dumont worked together after the actress approached the director, just as she had with auteurs like Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Abbas Kiarostami. For the forthcoming Clouds Of Sils Maria, Binoche came up with the premise – aging actress threatened by the presence of a youthful starlet – and then contacted Olivier Assayas, whom she'd worked with on 2008's Summer Hours.  “I felt so angry with him! I was so frustrated working with him the first time; I felt like he was frightened of actors, he was frightened of me!” Hoping to lead Assayas “into the feminine”, Binoche was delighted when her initial idea led to her, Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz shooting on location in Switzerland. “To see Olivier surrounded by actresses. I really felt, 'This is so much what I dreamt of, this is exactly what I wanted.'”