Hey all! I added some photos of Juliette from the 34th Deauville Film Festival to the gallery:

GALLERY LINKS
- 34th Annual Deauville Film Festival - “Dan In Real Life”
- 34th Annual Deauville Film Festival - “Dan In Real Life” Photocall

• Binoche’s career path knows no boundaries
• Ju’ bi lation - A season of dance, film & art featuring Juliette Binoche
• Added new photoshoots
• Welcome!
• Real Review - Dan in Real Life Blu-ray

It started with an elbow dug deep into sinew. The masseur took stock of the elfin frame belonging to Juliette Binoche and simply said: ‘You should be a dancer.’

The observation struck not just a muscle, but a chord too. Although she’d never done a day’s dance training in her life, Binoche found the idea taking root.

The masseur with the intuitive elbow just happened to be married to the manager of leading dancer and choreographer Akram Khan, a man acclaimed for his combination of contemporary and Indian classical technique. So Binoche took herself off to a performance of Zero Degrees, Khan’s award-winning collaboration with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.

From that moment, In-i, Binoche’s dance debut on stage, was born. ‘It’s important for me to face a different challenge. Do we just live or do we dare to live?’ says Binoche who, at 44, is very much a Renaissance woman. As well as In-i, which is set for a two-month run at the National Theatre, she is also the subject of a major retrospective of her movie career at the BFI Southbank, which stretches from her art-house roots in Mauvais Sang and Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf through to Hollywood hits The English Patient and Chocolat.

To top it all, the BFI Southbank is staging an exhibition of her paintings at the same time. A perfectionist, she is fretting over how the paintings, mostly lively, impressionistic portraits of directors she has worked with, have been hung. ‘Do you think people will see them here?’ she asks, mostly to herself, before explaining her restless creativity stretches back to her childhood.

‘It was an artist friend of my mother’s who first showed me you can be anything you want to be. There don’t have to be limits. She told me: “If you want to be an artist, then be an artist. Be whatever you want.” If we do the same thing again and again, then we simply rewrite ourselves.’ There was no guarantee In-i would get off the ground. Once introduced to Khan, the pair squirreled themselves away in a studio to see if they were creatively compatible.

So, did Khan have any expectations of this surprising encounter with Juliette Binoche, movie star? ‘She broke my expectations when she first laughed – it was such a human laugh,’ he says. ‘The laughter went on into the studio; it made it so full of life.’ The warmth between the pair is palpable. In response, Binoche pays tribute to Khan for ‘making me look like a dancer. It feels like we feed off each other’s sensibilities’.

One benefit of possessing a bankable name is once they’d decided they wanted to create a show together, the offers came flooding in. After the London run, a world tour is on the cards. ‘Only the Japanese are resisting,’ laughs Binoche. ‘They seem to want to know what it’s about.’

On that point, both Binoche and Khan are a touch elliptical. Early ideas about the symbolism of angels and Khan playing the guitar have fallen by the wayside (’I wish I’d never said that,’ says Khan, ‘but I will be singing’), a result of the improvisational process that has evolved in the studio as Binoche’s dancing and Khan’s acting – the cross-creative process is a two-way street – have grown stronger together.

What they will say is that it’s a show about couples and love, and the contribution of Turner Prize-winning artist Anish Kapoor, the third corner of this stellar creative triangle, plays a key part in proceedings. ‘There are so many different layers in the creation of it,’ says Khan. ‘The meaning changed and emerged as we improvised.’ Khan is well versed in working with artists, having enlisted Antony Gormley for Zero Degrees. ‘Working with visual artists is a whole other thing. They create in their own worlds and present you with the results.’

There is also text, written by Binoche. ‘At the start, words would come first because I didn’t know how it was possible for my body to respond. Now I know what you can’t say by the body, then you speak it. The reverse is true also. It’s about finding the best way to express what you want to say.’

She’s clearly revelling in the physical discipline of dance, complaining unconvincingly about the daily toil of taking class and the effort involved in keeping limber. So does she regret she didn’t turn to dance earlier in life? She looks uncharacteristically stern. ‘No, no. It’s not about regrets. It’s about pursuing the possibilities we can follow. The most important thing is daring to fail by pushing yourself.’ So what does In-i mean? Binoche flickers through an ineffably enigmatic Gallic smile. ‘What does In-i mean? What’s inside yourself. It’s as simple and as complex as that.’

source: metro.co.uk

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So why should I start dancing? I never really asked myself that question. I always felt, anyway, that I was dancing. To act is to dance. Isadora Duncan is an important artist for me. I read everything I could about her when I was playing Nina in Chekhov’s The Seagull a very long time ago, when I was 21 in France. Isadora had Sarah Bernhardt as an icon, and this feeling infected me, too, so I was very Isadora when I played in Konstantin’s over-heated play-within-a-play.

My work on this new theatre piece with Akram Khan, in-i at the National Theatre, which then goes on a big international tour, is nothing to do with trying to force a new stage in my career. With Akram, I felt that we could confront and share new desires, hopes and visions through our respective arts by inventing a common language. I don’t know the result yet, but I know the path that we’re taking is changing me radically. I never know what I’m capable of before I do it.

I may not have danced all that much before, but I’m aware of my body through doing Pilates. I’m 44 now, and I have two growing children, so I try to keep my energy levels as high as possible. With this new theatre piece, I know where we’re going when we enter the theatre, and it’s nothing to do with being a work in progress – everything is a work in progress. I’m changing all the time.

How can I say what my new performance will be about? It’s impossible, and there can be no diagnosis until the audience takes what they get, the medicine on the spoon. I don’t think that “show” is the right word. It is, I hope, an experience. I really don’t see art as being an expression of something outside of myself. Whether it’s writing, or painting, or dancing – which I have never done before on a stage – the medium changes because of what it is you are trying to express.

I secretly hope that faith will take over. I don’t want to be an actress, as a point of principle, why should I? It just happens that I’m acting because I’m in the process of meeting someone, myself, on the way back. But if you told me tomorrow that I wouldn’t be acting any more, then I’d be fine with that. Art is not about hanging on to things – it’s all about inventing.

It is the same thing whether I’m painting or acting. The common denominator is in the movement. I don’t dance but I paint in the air. Or I don’t paint, but I dance on the paper. My portraits of directors that are on show in the BFI alongside my film retrospective are impressions of people I’ve worked with at moments of reflection, or crisis, or creativity. And the portraits of myself are critical, and I think – I hope – revealing.

It’s very strange to be here in London without Anthony Minghella, whom I loved very much, and very painful. I was so frightened in the first week of shooting The English Patient, I was trembling, but he was trying to find a way to win my trust, and he just said to me, “Well, fly…” and I did and it changed my life. The poems that I’ve written in both French and English – they just came as they came, in French or English – complement my portraits, and the one for Anthony is very special to me:

searching in the battle of being

we attempted to glimpse the other side

dance took us in its arms

bliss of green nature in the land of oil and vine

your ideas became real to me

jumping to the hopscotch in the night

ascending to the paintings of your imagination

I grew by leaps and bounds

oil perfume mingled with hair

we traced our lives

your call came with silence

I was your angel as you opened my wings

I would jump forever

in the most sacred place

yearning for the sensation of trust

of love beyond ourselves

you taught me to be more human

lifted like a gift to myself

feet arms heads and hearts

we walked together as if life was happening

somewhere else

with joy with joy

I hope that conveys something of his talent as a human being, let alone as a film director. The two things are the same in my book. And that’s what the show is about, perhaps – it’s not about the answers, but the questions. Do we dare to love? Is emotion really love? I don’t register any difference in my relationship with Akram as a person or as an artist. We discover things about each other as we do it. I didn’t know him well to start with… we were diving off a high board without knowing where the water was.

But now we know each other really well. We have been through a lot of improvisation, starting with emotion and what emotion can do to the body, and that creates the movement. It’s a question of unlocking that emotion within ourselves and seeing how it moves, how it is animated. It was the same process, really, when I played in Pirandello’s Naked directed by Jonathan Kent at the Almeida 10 years ago and later in Pinter’s Betrayal, directed by David Leveaux, in New York.

It’s not a question of my being desperate to get back on to the stage. Even on a film set there are lots of people watching you. It’s the same kind of involvement; it’s just moving from an intimate to a more exposed space in the theatre. But the terror is the same.

Juliette Binoche was talking to Michael Coveney. ‘in-i’ will be at the National Theatre, London SE1 (020-7452 3000), from 6 September to 20 October; ‘Jubilations’, the retrospective of Juliette Binoche’s 25-year film career and an exhibition of her paintings, takes place at BFI Southbank, London SE1 (020-7928 2525) to 15 October; Binoche’s poems are published by Culturesfrance

source: independent.co.uk

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Hey everyone, I just added a ton of 2007 appearance photos to the gallery so check them out!

GALLERY LINK

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• Welcome!

Hey everyone, I’m the new owner of Merveilleuse Juliette Binoche and I give much thanks to Luciana for letting me take over.  I have lots of things planned for the site so keep on the lookout!

• Vanity Fair scans
• 2007 Appearances
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