The movie that almost made Juliette Binoche quit acting: “I found it too difficult”
Dividing her time between foreign films and a few Hollywood flicks, Juliette Binoche has always been a true talent, having started her career back in the early 1980s, and working with many iconic cinematic figures, from Jean-Luc Godard to Michael Haneke, Chantal Akerman, and Olivier Assayas, and you’ll struggle to find a living actor with a more impressive resumé.
Finding particular acclaim with her role in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy, especially Blue, Binoche is a well-respected star, but she hasn’t always been confident in her abilities, and she should be – after all, she won an Oscar for The English Patient and is cited as an inspiration to many, yet self-doubt can affect even the most talented of stars, even Academy Award winners.
Binoche had her first pangs of doubt when she was still relatively early on in her career. Following the success of Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang and Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which saw her appear alongside Daniel Day-Lewis, she re-teamed with Carax for Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. The film remains one of her greatest contributions to cinema, with Binoche taking on the role of a young woman living on the street with Denis Lavant’s alcoholic street performer, herself a painter slowly going blind.
Despite the fact that the film was a success, Binoche admitted to finding the whole ordeal a challenge. Should she just give up? “After Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, I wanted to stop because I found it too difficult,” she told Le Monde.
But she didn’t, of course, instead appearing alongside Jeremy Irons in the saucy psychological drama Damage by Louis Malle, and quickly following it with the role of Cathy in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, long before Margot Robbie’s take on the character – it must be said that Binoche was a much more book-accurate Cathy, even taking on the role of her daughter, Catherine, too.
Perhaps the challenge of playing a character like Michèle in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf made Binoche realise that acting can sometimes really take it out of you. Was this something she was actually cut out for? It’s a good job that Binoche stuck with it, otherwise, she wouldn’t have bagged an Oscar, a Bafta, or the various other accolades she no doubt has lined up on a shelf at home.
With that being said, Binoche still gets feelings of doubt, even now. 20 years ago, she considered packing it all in again, and she did end up taking a step back for a year and a half, unsure whether she was set on a life in the spotlight any longer.
“And at 40, I had a sort of desert crossing where I really had no more desire to film. I stopped for a year and a half. I only took care of my children. Then the desire returned,” she said. Despite appearing in multiple films a year rather consecutively, 2009 sticks out as a period of absence for Binoche, whose last credit of 2008 was simply ‘woman in the audience’ in Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin.
By 2010, though, she’d re-teamed with him for an award-winning turn in Certified Copy, which seemed to bring her spark back. Sometimes you do just need some time off, but Binoche is testament to the fact that you should never give up completely.
