From bowling with Steve Carell and winning an Oscar for a prestige literary adaptation to questioning the artifice of relationships and generating nerve-rattling tension, Juliette Binoche has done it all. The one constant across her lauded career, tracing back to her earliest films with maestros like André Téchiné and Jean-Luc Godard, has been a focus on finding the best directors in the business and forging fruitful relationships with them.

For that reason alone, it is a no-brainer that Binoche, one of our greatest working actresses, would seek out a recurring collaboration with living legend Claire Denis. Throughout their individual careers, both have displayed a knack for plumbing emotional depths that other artists are afraid, or unable, to reach. The harsh truths of love, sex, desire, and how those themes can drive us to build each other up and tear ourselves apart, are so present in the canons of Binoche and Denis that it’s almost a surprise they took so long to link up.

Their first collaboration, on 2017’s Let the Sunshine In, takes what could be a conventional rom-com premise (a divorced mother is looking for true love, but she just can’t figure it out!) and turns it into an incisive look at a woman so hobbled by her expectations for everything to be perfect, for a whirlwind romance to sweep her off her feet, that she self-sabotages at every turn. It’s not Sandra Bullock stumbling her way to a happy ending. No spoilers, but Let the Sunshine In is ultimately a rom-com twisted into a tragedy.

The duo would reunite the following year for High Life, Denis’ English-language debut and her first time traversing the deep reaches of space. As expected, this isn’t an awe-inspiring celebration of the virtuosity of human curiosity, but a treacherous journey with a craft full of prisoners who are being shuttled off as guinea pigs and are now hurtling toward the oblivion of a black hole, waiting for their lives to end.

Robert Pattinson takes on the leading role in High Life—infatuated with Denis as a filmmaker, he demanded to meet and convinced her that he was the right choice for the role, despite her envisioning the part entirely differently. Binoche, meanwhile, appears as a maniacal doctor who uses the prisoners’ lack of autonomy to conduct terrifying sexual experiments on them. It is not a film for the faint of heart, though depending on your interpretation of the ending some viewers may find a surprising note of optimism when it’s all said and done.

Both Sides of the Blade had its US premiere at Film at Lincoln Center’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema back in March, while Binoche also starred in another film at that fest, Emmanuel Carrère’s Between Two Worlds, a ion project that she had been trying to get off the ground for over a decade. An adaptation of French journalist Florence Aubenas’ nonfiction book The Night Cleaner, the film follows Aubenas’ investigation into the poor working conditions of low-wage cleaners, disguising herself as one of them to get a sharper ing of their world.

After chatting with Denis about her filmmaking process, I dialed up Binoche for a conversation about Both Sides of the Blade, Between Two Worlds, and the deceptive nature of her profession. 

You’ve worked with Claire Denis a few times now. How did she initially approach you about Both Sides of the Blade, and what were your first impressions of the film?
Juliette Binoche: Well, Claire doesn’t start a film mentally at all. There’s something about her on set that is searching for something different, that is trying to capture something to reference her feelings. If she loves something or feels something particular, she goes in that way: it’s not a mental kind of preparation. Or maybe, if there is, it’s through a garment or shoes or hairstyle, or something related to a visual aspect.

After that, when thinking emotionally or how she sees the film growing, I don’t think she has an idea yet. It’s the presence of the actor that’s going to help her push her view of this film toward the editing room, which is where she’s going to make the film. It’s not a classical way of working. I love observing her searching for it and finding it because it’s something very… like a painter, really. She has to be in the matter of it in order to know what’s going on, but she’s always having new ideas. I heard her say once, “Oh, for her, we are going to do close-ups and it’s going to be his point of view. So, the camera is behind him,” so she had some decisions that she made with the DP [Éric Gautier], but not so much with the actors.

On this film specifically, she really let Vincent and myself deal with each other. And that was not easy. That wasn’t easy for Vincent, and it wasn’t easy for me because we are strong personalities and I cannot take shit. I cannot take shit. And if I feel a macho feeling, a macho way of acting, I’m like a wild animal. Either that or I withdraw. I can withdraw as well and then I wait. Claire knew Vincent—they had done two films before this together, as had I, so she really cared for both of us. I think during the shooting, she loved us as well as hated us. It was a raw film. It was a difficult film to make, but we knew that it was just for a moment and we had to go through it. In the end, she was going to try and do the best she could.

To go through it and not be stuck with ideas, not be stuck with the moral condition or societal condition. That’s very brave because who wants to be in that situation? Nobody wants to be in between two people, unless you’re fucked up. And of course, in the case of Vincent’s character, it’s unbearable to be betrayed. He feels totally betrayed, yet he’s playing a game with his best friend. So it was a very complicated and tormenting subject matter, and I think the three of us were very brave.

One of the things I found interesting is the way the specific word “love” is used throughout. There’s a sex scene with Sara and Jean where she is repeating, “My love, my love, my love,” then later when François reunites with Sara he refers to her with the same phrase. Did you feel any emphasis on the word “love” and how it was employed in the film?
I’m trying to how it came across because I don’t think it was that way in the script. It was only written once maybe, and then I kept repeating it. I was pulling from my own experience, because I had been through a situation like this in my early twenties—a triangle situation, with me and two men—and it was a nightmare. It was the worst time of my life, and I think it was the worst time for the three of us.

I think it pushes you to a place where there’s a huge metaphysical reflection about what it is, love. It becomes need and it becomes conflict. It becomes an unsolvable situation. It becomes guilt, it becomes anger, it becomes so many things.

To start with, it was just that aspiration of… you can call it love, but you can call it need, or you can call it being known, or you can call it surprise. So it’s just human beings having to live life. What is the connection between what you are having come into your life and your brain and your education? Trying to make sense of it is trying to deal with your needs. As actors, of course, we do that all the time, because we have to understand the need of the character as well as the conflicts of it.

Being put into this situation makes you think about love and what is not love. You could say love for Vincent’s character would be for him to say, “Yeah, go ahead. Tell your story. I love you. I trust you. If you need this, do it.” That would be love. But you can also say love can be, “No, you don’t have the right to do that. I want you. I need you. Please don’t destroy our relationship,” and that could be called love. So, there’s a moment you feel like, “Okay, what is love?”

I don’t know, but what you can say is the truth. What is truth to you? When you express your feelings, that’s a way of loving yourself and loving the other as well, because you are putting words on things that are incomprehensible and that are sometimes unreachable, but it doesn’t necessarily make sense. If you have the courage to go through that, I think you’re a hero.

Between Two Worlds has been something of a ion project of yours for over a decade now. What was it about that story that you really connected with and needed to turn into a film?
I’m not sure what you call them in America, but in the book, they’re called the invisible—people working small jobs cleaning, coming to help handicapped people or older people in their homes, they’re jobs that are very badly paid and it’s a lot of work. They have to travel long distances, sometimes without cars, to do all of this work and not having much money at the end of it. It’s an important subject matter, especially after Covid, because they’re jobs where they don’t have contracts, and if they don’t work they cannot survive.

I also found it important, perhaps unconsciously, because my grandmother came from Poland during the war in . When she was in Poland, she had a normal, quite comfortable life with a job and friends, even though she was a foreigner married to a French man. They separated during the war, and afterward, she started doing small jobs, like being a seamstress. What I mean by small jobs, by the way, is just not earning a lot of money, working hard and not being able to make a living out of it, and so I think that affected this story resonating so much with me.

It’s an interesting character because it brings up this moral dilemma of her essentially lying to these people in order to embed herself in that world as authentically as she could, in order to help bring attention to it. In a lot of ways, that’s what you do as an actor. Was that parallel something on your mind while making the film?
Yeah, it’s an interesting subject matter especially for actors because as you said, it’s that parallel. I have to say that when Emmanuel wrote the script, I had my doubts about the fact that the film finishes on a conflict. He kept saying, “Yeah, but she’s lying. She is going back to her life and the cleaning lady is going back to her life.” I would say, “Emmanuel, how can you condemn the writer in a way? Because she is trying to show the world what’s happening in their lives. Because nobody is listening to them, so it’s a really strong way to make people aware of what’s going on.”

We had a lot of discussions about that, but I felt it was strong to finish the film with that question. Can you do that or not as a writer or as an actor? Especially if you do an art form—whether it’s a book or a film—can you use people without them knowing, to make them think you are like them, or make them think you’re friends? It’s a big question. I don’t have the answer. I know that when I did [The] Lovers on the Bridge, I lived in the streets. There was one person who knew I was an actress, but when I went to sleep down where the tramps are being taken care of in a way, they didn’t know I was an actress.

At the same time, you’ve got to ask the question: if I had to say to the people that I’m an actress, they would’ve changed their behavior. So I wouldn’t have had the experience the same way that I needed to, because it feels that I need to be legitimate in order to play a role—not learning out of a book, or out of a film. I need to expand it in order to really have the right to talk about that subject. So there are different ways of looking at it, and I totally understand as well the feeling of betrayal, the anger of trusting someone who is saying, “I’m not who you think I am,” because you cannot judge from the outside. You’ve got to respect those feelings.

There were a few questions that did come up during it, though. What I mean by that is that most of the time, Kieślowski knew where to put his camera. We were rehearsing quite a lot of time and shooting one or two takes, and that was it. Sometimes I asked him to reverse that, where we’d do one rehearsal and five takes, but it didn’t work.

There were a couple of times where he was really reflecting on where to put the camera and I was very surprised because in general, he was going so quickly with everything, him and his DP, Sławomir Idziak. They had already done some of Dekalog together, so there was a quick understanding of each other and their decision-making. But twice, I they were wandering around and around and around. There was one scene where you have a paper in the ashtray, and we’re at the back rehearsing, and that was one where he really was having a big reflection on it.

The other was in the swimming pool. I was in the swimming pool waiting for them to decide, so I started proposing stuff: I can do this, and I can worry about that and worry about that. They picked it up because they were a little bit stuck, probably because they were not in there bathing with me, so I think that helped. I helped a lot there. And that ended up being that moment where I’m floating almost like a fetus in the water, just hanging there.