Fire within
She jumped out of a plane for one film, and learned waterskiing so she could glide across the Seine for another. But for her next film, Juliette Binoche has done something very few actors of her generation have done: she went to Iran, seen as a pariah state by American and European governments for the past three decades. And it wasn't just a one-off visit: well before the high-profile visit by American filmmakers and actors earlier this year, Binoche had already been to Tehran twice in the past three years, meeting Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, who will direct Binoche this summer in the film Certified Copy.
'I kept meeting with Abbas and he said to me, 'Come to Iran, come to Iran'. And I was like, 'Come to Iran? All right ...',' she says. 'And there was the tension at the moment with [allegations of Iranian plans to develop] nuclear bombs and the western world saying terrible things about Iran. But there was a moment I felt like I want to see what's going on. Why do we have to believe what the media say? What if it's not true what they're saying, and they are not terrible people?'
Her beliefs were confirmed soon after landing in Iran, when she got to mingle with Kiarostami's associates and Iranian artists and actors. 'And they are not terrible people: they're so alive, they know about all the films and music going on. They have a wonderful culture,' she says. 'It's true that in the street women have to wear [the headscarf] and some are just fed up with it - and I don't blame them because whether you want to put it on or not is another story ... but you should be free [to decide not to]. But at home the women are very alive. They're very Italian-like, and they rule the house,' she says, laughing.
It's during the second visit that Binoche did something else unheard of since the breakdown of Iran's diplomatic relations with the west: she acted in a film there. She made a brief appearance in Shirin, in which Kiarostami filmed Binoche and 111 actors reacting to a performance of a 12th-century Iranian literary saga. It's closer to a video in an art installation, yes, but Shirin is more powerful than a simple summary of its content might suggest. The initial bemusement of watching people watch something slowly gives way to empathy, as Kiarostami unfurls his 92-minute litany of mournful, melancholic faces.
The truth is the actors were not watching the play at all, but a white board with three black dots on it. The film's sweeping soundtrack was added during post-production. This means the actors are imagining what they should be seeing, just as much as we imagine what the Persian saga should look like.
It's nearly the ultimate test for these actors, a task that demands them to give their all in order to emote. With her pedigree playing tragic characters in heartrending dramas, Binoche should not have found this too difficult. Not quite. 'I can't remember what I thought about, but I knew I had to go through different things,' she says. 'There was a moment I laughed - and I laughed quite a lot - and [Kiarostami] said to me, 'If I had known you were going to do this, I would have changed the subject matter, because there are no laughing moments in the way of this story.''