HOWZAT

Why was it so frightening? She makes an airy motion with her hands: “I felt I had somehow to fly, and then I had to walk. Inside I felt I had to go to places I really didn’t know, and yet I had to be human.” She sighs. “Hana was a little girl somehow. You know, when she’s playing, you know, with the stone . . .” she grasps for the word. “Hiphotch?”

Hopscotch! “Yes. That character was such an orphan. Everything she touches was exploding or dropping or dying, so there is a feeling of abandonment. I think I had to feel that inside: to be in a state of nothing. That’s the beauty of the role because at the end life is coming back to her.”

Did the Oscar change anything for her? She mulls it over and nods. “Certainly there was a period of time after The English Patient when I went back to my country and I was trying to be the good girl, the ‘good actress’, you know? So I did one or two period films. I don’t know if they were more conservative films, but they were ‘established’ films — maybe because I didn't get the sort of offers that would trigger something new. Now it’s sort of the reverse. I am going to the directors I admire and want to work with, because I started outside the mainstream and I am hungry for those experiences, for a new way of acting in films.”

She tells me how a film publicist in Paris (whom she had never met) phoned her and said that she should work with an Austrian film-maker by the name of Michael Haneke. “She sent me five of his films and I was amazed by his work. I met him and we ended up doing Code Unknown and then Hidden. The same woman introduced me to the films of Hou Hsiaohsien, from Taiwan, and I am making a film with him in Paris right now.”

It’s an unusual collaboration, even in cinephile France: Hou is one of the more exotic flowers on the arthouse scene, famous for shooting scenes in long single takes. But there are more surprises in store. In the spring Binoche will make a film with the Iranian minimalist Abbas Kiarostami, best known in this country for Ten. There is a project with the Israeli director Amos Gitai, then maybe something with the Cambodian documentary film-maker Rithy Panh.

“A film comes from a connection,” Binoche explains. “It doesn’t only come out of the imagination, it comes from communication, and feeling some kind of need to tell a story together.

“I went to spend time with Abbas in Tehran, and he told me a story that had happened to him. Then at the end he said: ‘Do you believe me?’ I said: ‘Every word’. And he said: ‘Well, it’s not true’. I laughed so much, then I giggled the whole afternoon. This guy is crazy! And after seeing that he fooled me and that I laughed so much he decided it must be a good story, so we are doing it together.”

And after that, she adds, she is doing a comedy with Steve Carell — from Kiarostami to The 40 Year Old Virgin. She catches my expression and now we’re both laughing.

Breaking and Entering will be shown at the LFF (020-7928 3232) on Oct 27 at 20.30, and Oct 29 at 13.30, at the Odeon West End

BINCOCHE: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL

Hidden (2005)
Binoche’s discovery that her TV arts pundit husband is receiving secretly shot videos of himself and his family is a masterclass of controlled unease and anguish as her marriage and chic world begin to unravel.

Damage (1992)
Screen sex at its most ridiculous as Jeremy Irons’s MP makes love to Binoche as his son’s girlfriend while bashing her head against the floor. Doesn’t generate smouldering intensity but unintended laughter.

The English Patient (1996)
Binoche’s wartime nurse is at her most luminous when taken to a dark church. There she’s hooked up to a rope, handed a flare and hoisted up in the air to swing around and marvel at the beautiful frescos.

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