Trying Hollywood, just for laughs

It’s odd to see Juliette Binoche, the great French star, stomping away on a treadmill, breathing heavily, even, yikes, sweating in a distinctly un-Gallic fashion. It’s not that French women shouldn’t exercise, but Binoche is best known for the ethereal innocence with which she has infused such films as “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “The English Patient,” as well as perhaps her greatest performance, as the widow in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors: Blue” steadfastly trying to bury herself in anomie.

Yet there she is in the new comedy “Dan in Real Life,” puffing away as she works out, her dark locks matted with sweat, one of a million American women marching along the electronic walkway on the journey toward thinness. In the comedy from writer-director Peter Hedges, funnyman Steve Carell plays a widower who inadvertently falls for his brother’s girlfriend (Binoche) during a long weekend with his extended family. Considering how well she’s known in the rest of the world, Binoche has appeared in relatively few American movies, having famously turned down Steven Spielberg’s offer to star in “Jurassic Park” to make “Blue.”

Indeed, this brief stop in Hollywood comes smack in the middle of a global tour of filmmaking. In the last year, she’s gone to the Negev desert to shoot Israeli director Amos Gitai’s film “Disengagement,” Argentina for “Another Kind of Silence,” made several French films and appeared in Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou’s “Flight of the Red Balloon,” as well as Japanese director Nobuhiro Suwa’s segment of the anthology film “Paris, Je t’aime.” There are plans afoot to make “The Certified Copy” with Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, which delves into the philosophical question, “What is more true, the original or the copy?”; she recently visited the arts community in Tehran.

She’s only come to Los Angeles to publicize “Dan in Real Life” (opening Oct. 26), and she seems slightly dismayed by the questions hurled at her here. Entertainment reporters asked “if I’m frightened of age; if I’m frightened of not getting parts; if I’m frightened . . . the kind of questions that put you in a depression after a while, because it’s, like, so narrow-minded,” she says with a grimace over tea in the restaurant of her hotel. “I felt like, wow, it must be something to live here and being in the American system of making movies.”

Fear does not appear to play in Binoche’s lexicon, particularly the fear of aging. Binoche was the face of cosmetic giant Lancome for several years and, at 43, remains gorgeous. Her visage doesn’t appear to have been massacred by plastic surgery and maintains the curious pliability of a sad clown. Her brown eyes are slightly down-turned with shadows underneath, made more apparent by the ivory whiteness of her skin. Her smile doesn’t set out to conquer, but sneaks out shyly. She’s dressed with French panache -- jeans, with a snug denim vest over a big white shirt over a white tank top. She’s small and thin but without the aerobicized definition of many American actresses.

On another level, Binoche appears to be a seeker -- the kind of person who’s determined forever to push into new terrain. To make movies is “to break the rules all of the time and try to find other ways to express yourself, and not to fit in, because it’s almost antithetic to the work we’re doing as artists. You have to somehow push yourself into different minds and different visions, and different emotions in order to have an exploration of the human kind. I understand the danger of being stuck -- because for me, to break the rule is to do the Holywood films because I’m not used to it.”

The Hollywood try

Ayen for new experience is partly why she has ended up in a Disney/Steve Carell comedy, in a part more typically played by the Jennifer Anistons and Drew Barrymores of the world. In real life not every person wants the girl next door, but in Hollywood, that’s what’s considered the most salable.

“You don’t expect Juliette Binoche to be playing opposite Steve Carell. A number of people questioned what I was thinking,” Hedges says. “The people [in the U.S.] who hadn’t seen her. . . . But she’s the kind of person that you could imagine doing all sorts of unspeakable things to get a chance to be with.” Binoche was one of the first people to whom Hedges, best known for the screenplay for “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and his directorial debut in the micro-budgeted family dramedy “Pieces of April,” had sent the script, but months went by before she read it, so long that he was about to screen test five other actresses when he heard she was interested.

“I got on the plane, the first one that went to Paris,” recalls Hedges, who’d never been to the City of Light. “She picked me up at her hotel and took me to some remote Parisian restaurant. She got lost. I was being driven around in her station wagon. She’s a wild driver. It was a bit of a shock.”

Binoche, who chooses her projects strictly by director, had liked Hedges’ little indie -- and “felt the world needed more laughter. She just wanted to flex her muscles -- she wanted to be in an American comedy that didn’t feel like her perception of what most American comedies are: loud, brightly lit, overly scored, broad-humored . . . those are the things that she was worried about.”

In retrospect, “I realized that person I met at dinner was the person I was hoping to see on film. She’s delightful, funny, open, smart. I didn’t know how to explain that she didn’t need to do much acting.”

Yet Binoche had to imbue the part with a point more than just radiating her natural loveliness. The film is set in Rhode Island, far away from the Parisian suburbs where she lives with her two children, ages 14 and 7, whose fathers -- a professional scuba diver and the actor Benoit Magimel -- are two past loves.

In “Dan in Real Life,” she explains, “I was all about being in this world, and how this character wants to fit in so much and being part of the family, and longing for being accepted, and trying to be the perfect woman, this angel. Glowing. . . . But actually, inside the needs are so deeply hidden.”

Binoche usually prepares intensely for her parts, and this was no exception. She worked with her acting coach, Susan Batson, and dove headfirst into all things American, working out for months. (Her character meets her initial boyfriend in a gym.) “I loved it. I learned all the games. I did the aerobics stuff and tried to understand how the rules of the American football work.”

In the film, her character charms the extended family of Carell’s character by cooking them pancakes -- and Binoche practiced by donning a chef’s hat and inviting cast and crew members over practically every weekend for pancakes. Unfortunately, on the day of the scene, “one of the kids had an allergic problem to wheat, so it ended up being very wheat-free, gluten-free and everything. So the actors were getting this pack of pancakes and were being sick a little bit at the end of the day.” She laughs.

Performing in English was no problem. In America, she thinks in English. But then again, as she points out, language in acting -- her conception of acting -- is only the tip of the iceberg, she says, using the familiar metaphor. She tries to enter into a compact with the audience, to invite them into her mystery. “For me, acting is to express just enough for people to guess and to make their imagination work, and ask questions about who she is and what she is going through. Why this? And why that? Instead of giving it all.”

In almost all of Binoche’s performances, there’s an exquisite penumbra of vulnerability, which seduces and binds the viewer to her. Her parents, French actor-artists, sent her off to Catholic boarding school at the age of 4. Her grandmother was the cook there, but still.

“It was ’68. In Paris, you had all the strikes, the anger going on in the streets. My parents were very political. They were communists and they were involved. . . . That was the only solution they could have. . . . It’s part of me. I think it’s where I created my inside world. My imagination started to grow and blossom somehow, because you’ve got to find a way to survive that. As a human being, there is so much you find in order to fit into that situation.” Binoche’s playacting “brought me a lot of joy.”

“I was re-creating a house all the time, and living in the house,” she says. “I was in love with snails. I would feed them. I had a very strong feeling for a tree. I remember putting my back on the trunk. It was like --” She claps her hand. “A force. Almost like ‘I am who I am.’ It’s almost like Pascal -- I am who I am. And it felt very related, the roots and branches. It was not rational. It’s something very sensorial and profound.”

Her parents came to take her home on weekends. “It was joyful because there was liberation. I remember the sound of their car, the smell of the car.”

She stayed for three years. Later, she attended the National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in Paris but dropped out. She eventually broke through internationally when she starred in Andre Techine’s 1985 film “Rendez-vous” as a sexually compulsive French free spirit who falls for a sadistic actor. She broke through internationally playing Tereza, Daniel Day-Lewis’ compassionate wife in Philip Kaufman’s rendition of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” about three interconnected lovers during the Prague spring of 1968.

“It was kind of scary,” Binoche recalls. “I was chosen 10 days before shooting and it was my first English-language film. I didn’t have time to prepare. I had to not think and plunge.” Director Anthony Minghella saw her in it and, 10 years later, cast her in “The English Patient” as the nurse Hana, who believes everyone who comes close to her dies. Her performance won the Academy Award, after which she was flooded with Hollywood offers. Most were unimpressive. “I felt like, ‘What am I supposed to do in the movie? What’s the interest I have as a woman to be in a movie like this?’ Because it’s a lot male-oriented, I feel.”

Charting her course

Instead she opted to do the Pirandello play “Naked” in London and a spate of French movies. In America, she was most recently seen as a Bosnian refugee in Minghella’s “Breaking and Entering,” and in Michael Haneke’s superbly unnerving French thriller “Cache,” playing half of a French bourgeois couple tormented by a series of videotapes surreptitiously made of their life.

Haneke, with whom she’d worked previously, was like “a surgeon,” she said. “He was scanning every detail, any kind of silence or thought or feeling I was going through.” She dissects the various directors she’s worked with, commenting on each one’s radically different way of evoking emotion. Kieslowski rehearsed her intensely but then did just one take. Then he’d say, “Why don’t you do exactly the same thing you did at the last rehearsal. I said, ‘Well, because each moment is different, each take is different,’ ” says Binoche, who remained close to the director even after filming.

That was completely different from her experience with Taiwanese master Hsiao-hsien Hou on “Flight of the Red Balloon,” which recently played the New York Film Festival. That director shoots from only one angle, but then “totally [trusts] the actor, or the non-actor because usually [he doesn’t] take actors,” Binoche says. “Everybody is free” to do whatever they want as long as they follow the story.

Making “Dan in Real Life” was distinctly less auteurish than other recent experiences. “It’s like a lesson on how to make a movie,” she says, giggling. A Hollywood movie. “Part 1, you do a wide shot, then you do a person-to-person and change angles. You cover.”

It’s hard to tell if she found covering to be totally satisfying artistically.

“It’s disarming how honest she can be,” says Hedges with a laugh. “She’ll always tell you the truth and some days that’s hard because her truth can be, ‘You’re not doing your job.’ ” His job was complicated by the fact that he was often shooting scenes with 19 assorted cast members playing the family, and there was little time to rehearse with Carell, who “arrived five hours before we started to film. There were days where you have to be, ‘Move here,’ or I felt we wouldn’t get through the day, and there was a time when she said, ‘You need to give us more time to find it organically.’ I was a better director after that.”

“I have to see the film again, because I saw it [only] once,” muses Binoche, admitting that, like many actors, she obsesses about her own performance. “It’s difficult. You see the scenes missing, the choice of takes.” She found Hedges to be a “very sensitive man.” He listened; he tried to understand what she thought, but in the end there were moments when she wished her character was allowed to be. . . . She trails off, stumbling around for the right word, “. . . a little bit more angry, upset.”

But then again, as the poster that features a solo shot of Carell’s head on a pile of pancakes suggests, big mainstream comedies don’t usually traffic in the chimeric, contradictory impulses of their female leads. In Hollywood, the perfect woman must always be the perfect woman, even when she’s Juliette Binoche. Says La Binoche, as they call her in France, “I think he tried to smooth it somehow.”

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rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com