Slant Magazine

Slant: You've talked about how different it was to work with Hou Hsiao-hsien, who likes to cede an enormous amount of control to his actors, than with Michael Haneke, who wants to control as much as possible in his movies. Where does Kiarostami fall on that scale of no control to total control, and what was it to work with him?

Juliette Binoche: With Abbas, the frame is so controlled. The frame is really his art form. I think, because he's a photographer, when he has the vision of the scene he has the scene. And after that he lets things happen. What he's really keen on is controlling the pace in between shots, so when he cuts to another scene, the pace has to be right on the money. We re-shot one piece just because I was walking too fast, coming from one room to the next one. He's very picky on those details because, for him, it really makes the movie. But the [internal] emotional world…I would say he really left me free.

There was one moment in the café scene, when the Italian bartender asks the man a question and then he turns to me and he says, "What shall I answer?" and I have a certain reaction. In this moment [in one of the takes] I lost control: I kind of laughed and cried [at the same time]. Abbas was taken aback by my reaction, and in the end, in the editing room, he took another [take]. It was so interesting for me, because we had an argument about it. I said, "Why don't you take this scene? Because that really is a moment that happens in life. It's not controlled at all. It's life taking over." He said, "Well, it's not believable…" I really felt like it was the same kind of dilemma that the two characters have, man and woman: the controlling of the man and the emotional, you know, claiming of the woman. So there was a sense of collaboration and freedom of discussing what needed to be done—or not.

But, you know, the woman is actually him [Kiarostami]. He raised his children on his own, because in Iran when a couple gets divorced, the man has the children, not the woman. So I didn't feel like he was on the other side of the river, not at all. He understood each point of view. But he can feel and see that men have a tendency of protecting themselves through, you know, logic and intellectual skills, as women take the risk of exposing themselves. And he says, at the end of the day they're right, because they take the risk of feeling more vulnerable, of feeling needy. Not protecting yourself.

Slant: Did you improvise any of the dialogue, or was it very tightly scripted?

JB: Very scripted. Some moments [were improvised]. Like when I was driving—you bump into things you didn't expect.

Slant: Like that woman in the street?

JB: Yeah [laughs].