Smash hit

“I remember running down a corridor with my diaper on.” You wonder why she remembered that. Perhaps because she felt neglected that nobody came to change it. She sees loneliness or sadness as interesting.

“Why do people think I’m so heavy? Is it because I choose roles and stories that are meaningful? I never set a rigid line between comedy and tragedy. One can’t be there without the other. We all have to go through events that are going to change us, and it’s the change I’m interested in.

“In this story [Dan in Real Life] my character [Marie] has to get over embarrassment more than anything. She is the lover of one brother and has fallen for the other. The situation is completely tragic. It just happens to be funny. You need to have humour in order to breathe, otherwise everything would be unbearable, everything would be sadomasochistic, but if you have both poles in order, you are alive and true.”

Being alive and true to herself is a priority. She only wants to do films that resonate “in minds and hearts”.

“To make a movie, to get money, to be famous, to get power and all that… It’s disgusting,” she says.

She’s had many chances of Hollywood fame and power. She turned down Spielberg’s offer of appearing in Jurassic Park, and said at the time: “I’d rather play a dinosaur than one of the humans.” She also rejected Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible opposite Tom Cruise. “When you’re in a machine, you must fit in. I’m too much of an independent soul to get into that machine. It’s too dangerous.”

It’s amusing to think that Tom Cruise would have been eaten alive by Binoche. Instead, Binoche seems to have been ravaged by the intense pace at which she has worked, doing five films back-to-back in 10 months Was she exhausted from working so hard? “There are moments where I felt like a squeezed lemon, but sometimes when you create you bring energy.” She doesn’t seem to have much energy at the moment. Unselfconsciously, she sticks her chin in her polo neck and peers out like a turtle. She asks where I was born. In her eyes and in her voice muffled under her polo neck she conveys intense curiosity, but when I reply, she just says: “Mmm.”

“I haven’t filmed since June, because I am training for my dance show at the National Theatre next September.”

I didn’t know you danced. “I am not dancing. I am learning to dance,” she says. Silence. Then a big, cackling, nervous laugh lightens the air. Despite having had no training, she will perform contemporary dance choreographed by Akram Khan.

“I started working for two hours a day. Now I am doing more.” And what is the dance that you have to perform? “There’s no have to, there’s I want to,” she corrects. “We start rehearsing in February with Akram, so we’ll know better when we meet up and see where it goes. I love the challenge of not knowing. I don’t want to come to him with too many things, but I am working on a sort of vocabulary, so we have some elements.”

And who else is working with you? “Just him and myself. Mmmm,” she says. I’m not sure if she means this is delicious or terrifying, or maybe both. She intends to dance for at least a year, maybe two. In that time she will do just one film with the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami in Certified Copy. “It’s very funny, very intelligent and tragic.” She laughs one of her deep, dark laughs.

Binoche says her childhood was filled with joy, yet she talks about being sent away to school at four and being traumatised. Her parents split up when she was three or four. Her father, Jean-Marie Binoche, was a theatre director and sculptor. Her mother, Monique Stalens, an actress. She has talked about her loneliness. How the characters she has created over the years were her own tragic sisters. Perhaps because she was an only child and needed those relatives? I can give her empathy because I too am an only child, I tell her. “Somehow you overwhelm your shyness because you have something bigger than yourself and beyond yourself. So they change you, these characters, because you let go of some problems you might feel within yourself, while you are working. You have to expose yourself in front of so many people in front of the camera. Whether you’re naked or not, your emotion is naked. The game of the actor is to forget yourself, and in dance and painting it’s the same thing. It doesn’t matter how successful you’re going to be, it’s just the story you have to tell.”

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