Juliette Binoche revisits her career in the light of #metoo in a long interview with the newspaper Libération

Actress Juliette Binoche looks back on her beginnings and recounts the different ordeals she had to go through on set and during castings.

In a long interview published by the newspaper Libération on Friday April 26 (paid article) Juliette Binoche describes a journey during which she had to endure embarrassing situations, even “humiliating”attacks, and also sometimes mistreatment, before learning to say no.

“Revisiting its beginnings without anachronism in the light of the #MeToo revolution: such is the challenge of this meeting with Libération”underlines the journalist in the introduction to this long story that Juliette Binoche “re-read and refined to clarify certain wording or details”.

Straightforward, the actress recounts certain scenes with precision and cites names, such as that of director Pascal Kané. “He invites me to dinner at the Nikko hotel in the heights of a tower to talk to me, he assured me, about another project. As he points out the view of the Seine front, he threw himself at me to kiss me. I pushed him away vigorously. remembers Juliette Binoche, then a young beginner actress.

“I didn’t always know how to protect my comrades”

“I couldn’t believe it. I had some signs of mistrust, the first time having been touched by a schoolmaster at 7 years old who taught me to read by caressing my penis behind his desk in front of the class”she adds.

She also discusses the filming of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. “On this film, the director entered my trailer to grope me. I pushed him away, he didn’t insist. Lena Olin, who played the other female role, told me that she had had the right to to the same attempts”.

“I didn’t always know how to protect my comrades”, regrets the actress, who remembers certain scenes she was able to witness during her career. “I understood in hindsight, it was barely perceptible, that an extra was raped by an actor in Children of the Century during an opium scene in a brothel. I saw the young woman leaving stunned once the filming was over, as if she had been punched. I had hatred. This actor is dead today.

“There wasn’t a script without a nude scene.”

The actress remembers the 80s and 90s when nudity was almost obligatory, in castings and on set. “It did not completely escape me that this frantic need for naked bodies in cinema in the 80s and 90s only concerned young women, rarely men, except with Chéreau and subsequently Téchiné. It did not revolt me, I I took this requirement patiently. There was not a script without a nude scene.

And then over time, after particularly painful experiences, the actress learns to set limits. “It took me a long time to understand that I could demand, when the scenes required it, a closed set. Or question a bare scene in a script that I didn’t find necessary.”

In addition to sexual violence, the actress evokes a climate of mistreatment on film sets, recounting how she almost drowned in general indifference on the set of Lovers of the Pont Neufby Léos Carax. “That day, my until then poorly defined limits suddenly became clear.”

“I had the feeling of belonging to a caste”

“When the young, mutant, hesitant actress gives herself through a role, she reaches out to her director for his approval. Completely, she is his, hers, the world. This request from the young actress does not give Doesn’t it give the filmmaker the illusion that everything is for him?” asks Juliette Binoche.

“I lived in an idealization of the director and defended author and independent filmmakers. With a certain submission that I associated with protection. I had the feeling of belonging to a caste, of approaching as closely as possible “a new, vibrant artistic form” she notes.

“I had to learn to say no, to recognize what I had to leave,” insists the actress, who says to herself “relieved to see and hear the testimonies of women and men who dare to expose the abuse they suffered. It is not easy to expose your intimate life, and we should all thank them “.