The San Sebastian Festival continues to look aft by projecting some of the most anticipated feature films of the 2022 film year —which our colleague Randy Meeks is telling us about in these parts—. But a contest of this type is much more than films, finding in the award ceremonies to prominent members of the industry, either in front of or behind the cameras, one of its greatest claims.
This year, the interpreter Juliette Binoche, who stars in the competition feature film ‘Fire’ by Claire Denis, has been one of the lucky ones in receive the first of the two Donostia Awards that will be presented at the 70th edition. An award presented by Isabel Coixet and which the Parisian thanked stating that, at the Zinemaldia, she feels “like at home”.
The chiaroscuro of youth and maturity
However, the real bombshells came hours before the ceremony, when Binoche spoke about her experience working with the recently deceased Jean-Luc Godard, with whom He shot ‘Yo te salute, María’ during the beginning of his acting career in a process that he describes as “nothing easy”.
“First I had a series of rehearsals and in the last one I had to be naked. At that time I worked as a cashier, and the contrast between what he asked me as an actress and what I lived in my day to day, remains in my memory. No He chose me for that role. But then when I shot with him, I saw that he was not a person who is not going to help you. With him it was like a fight. I felt that constant fight, a kind of conflict at his disposal. In my memory that time maybe five months. Maybe it was less. I was excited but I was also very scared (…) I learned that I couldn’t learn from him. It wasn’t easy working with Jean-Luc Godard.”
In addition, the actress, who has worked with filmmakers of the stature of Krzysztof Kieslowski, Philip Kaufman, Leos Carax, Michael Haneke or a David Cronenberg who will receive the second Donostia Prize of the year, has not hesitated to vindicate the passage of agestating that “getting older is also beautiful” and criticizing the lack of roles for mature women.
“Sometimes it has happened to me in American cinema. They have called me to be the wife. You have to say no to codified cinema. You have to know how to reject roles so as not to enter that system. macho codes.
Juliette Binoche, 58, is immersed in the process of filming the feature film ‘The Pot of Feu’directed by Anh Hung Tran, and from the series ‘The New Look’, in which she will give life to Coco Chanel. Both productions do not yet have a release date.