CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA written and directed by Olivier Assayas, with Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz. A Mongrel Media release. 123 minutes. Opens Friday (April 10). For venues and times, see Movies.
Juliette Binoche has compiled an intimidating Rolodex in a career spanning more than three decades. She’s worked with auteurs Jean-Luc Godard, Leos Carax, Michael Haneke, Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and, of course, her Clouds of Sils Maria director, Olivier Assayas – some of them repeatedly.
“My dream was to work with a lot of different directors from different worlds not belonging specifically to Hollywood,” says Binoche, who is the definition of an international star. She prefers the authorship afforded directors in European cinema as opposed to the hired hands of Hollywood, and has famously avoided working in big studio pictures.
This is the woman who passed up an offer from Steven Spielberg to star in Jurassic Park because she wanted to make Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy instead. She finally got a taste of blockbuster filmmaking in last summer’s Godzilla reboot. But there was a reason for that.
“My son is a big fan of Godzilla,” she explains. “It was fun for me to say, ‘Hey, Mom can do that as well.'”
Her children come up a few more times in the course of our interview. We’re sitting in a private room at the Ritz-Carlton’s Toca Restaurant during TIFF. Binoche is delicately working her way through the beans on her plate and a glass of white wine while discussing Clouds Of Sils Maria, her reunion with writer/director/friend Assayas. He wrote her first starring role in 1985’s Rendez-vous.
Binoche plays Maria Enders, a veteran actor coming to grips with middle age and what that means for her career. Like a modern All About Eve, the film pitches a generational conflict between Enders (a character with several parallels to Binoche) and her young personal assistant, Valentine, played to perfection by Kristen Stewart.
“I knew she would be fantastic,” says Binoche of her co-star. “I saw her in On The Road. I liked her. When I googled her and watched some interviews, the way she answers, the way she listens, the way she follows her own truth really made me feel that this girl is amazing.”
I latch onto the fact that Binoche googled Stewart, which is exactly what her character does when cast opposite a young, Stewart-like TMZ target played by Chloë Grace Moretz.
“Who doesn’t google?” Binoche responds, before quickly insisting that she sets limits when it comes to going online.
The internet becomes a character in Sils Maria, where tabloid gossip, smartphone footage and trolls in the digital world have an impact on the real. Binoche gets pretty passionate about the dangers of the internet, especially since she has a teen daughter who, like so many, is hooked to her iPhone.
“It’s this new interesting or essential world within our world,” she says. “It becomes big when you choose to make it big. I think it’s an illusion. The commenting on this and that is lost time. It’s communication to communicate on something to communicate on something.”
Binoche laments that simulated self-esteem boosts from Facebook and Instagram are replacing real social skills and the patience to build actual relationships. She interrogates me about how much TV and iPad time I give my own children, insisting that I must keep them away from digital distractions for as long as possible. She refuses to accept new media as a mere generational shift.
“I was passionate about seeing plays, paintings, films and reading books,” says Binoche. “Literature cannot be Twitter.”
Don’t miss our review of Clouds of Sils Maria here.
Binoche on choosing the Three Colors Trilogy over Jurassic Park
On her relationship with directors
On portraying a character with parallels to herself
On the changes wrought by the Internet
On how her parents controlled her past times
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