Oscar-winning actress Juliette Binoche touches down at the opening weekend of the San Sebastian Film Festival today for the world premiere of her directorial debut In-I In Motion.
The feature documentary goes behind the scenes of the 2008 dance theatre show In-I, co-created and starring Binoche alongside UK dancer and choreographer Akram Khan.
An exploration of love, laying bare the emotional highs and lows of a couple from their first meeting, the show premiered at the UK’s National Theatre in 2008 before going on a 100-date world tour.
Pooling their expertise in their separate artistic fields of acting and dance and wildly different life experiences, the pair built the show from scratch with the support of acting coach Susan Batson and dancer Su-Man Hsu, who was rehearsal director.
Speaking to Deadline just 24 hours before the death of Robert Redford was announced on Tuesday (September 16), Binoche revealed that it was the The Way We Were actor who first sewed the seed the idea of making a film about the production after he saw it in New York.
“He came to my dressing room and said, ‘You have to make a film out of this piece’. It stayed in my mind. We had one month to go on the tour, and then we were going to be finished,” recounts Binoche.
“I was a little bit in panic, thinking, ‘How am I going to make this happen?’ My sister (Marion Stalens) had been coming to rehearsals and filming us. I asked her if she would be willing to shoot the last show in Paris.”
“She did and then I put it in a drawer, not knowing when I was going to possibly make this happen… it was always there in the back of my mind, that I would find the time to do it… but because I was shooting, and caught up with the kids, with my life, it was absolutely impossible.”
Binoche’s involvement in the original show came about through a chance meeting when she was shooting Breaking and Entering in the UK in 2006, with the film reuniting her with The English Patient director Anthony Minghella for which they both won an Oscar.
Suffering from knots in her shoulders because of the intense shoot, Binoche hired a masseuse, with whom she became friends. She in turn invited the actress to a dance performance starring Khan, which her husband was producing.
The actress and Khan connected backstage where the idea of collaborating together on show was born. Binoche says it was the sense of the unknown which drew her to Khan’s proposal that they work together.
“I loved the idea of going to a place that I’d never been to before and the experience of the unknown, of is it possible when you’re not a dancer to actually move, and how do you make a movement as an actress. Do you put emotion into it, and if you put in emotion, how does it feel, how does it look?”
The actress credits acting coach Susan Batson – whose long list of famous alumnae also includes Nicole Kidman, Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, Tom Cruise, Zac Efron, Chris Rock, Jamie Foxx, and Rihanna – with helping her to forge the role and performance.
“We invited Susan Batson at the beginning to make this link, which was so not easy to find because we were inside. We needed to have an outsider. Of course, we had a camera while we were working, but we needed to find links.
“And thank God she was there. She was able to pin down this link between the sensation of the actress and a movement, that made sense to me, that was not an outside movement but was an inside movement.
“That’s why I think this experience is so special because usually you have the dancers, expressing themselves amazingly with their bodies, and actors being emotional with the text, but how do you connect that? How do you make a non-dancer show emotion through movement. How do you make a dancer express emotions?”
An opportunity to follow through on Redford’s suggestion and bring the production to the big screen finally arose two years ago when Binoche was approached by Norwegian investor Ola Ström at the Cannes Film Festival.
“He said, ‘I’d like to do something with you. I don’t know whether you have a special project you’d like to do.’ I asked my brother (Camille Humeau) who’s a producer to come with me to the meeting to see if this could happen, and actually, it did happen.”
Ström takes a co-producer credit under the banner of Yggdrasil alongside Solène Léger at Léger Production, while the production is lead produced by Sébastien de Fonseca at Miao Productions. Paris-based film company mk2 Films is handling international sales.
The resulting feature documentary In-I in Motion gives a fascinating insight into the intense process behind the creation of the show, with the vulnerabilities of both Binoche and Khan exposed, as she grapples with the act of expressing herself through dance, and he through words.
“What I loved in this experience is the need of transformation and the possibility of transformation. I’d like this film to inspire people in their lives and in their craft to try something new and to be creative in their own lives,” says Binoche.
“Maybe this film will lead people to believe in a part of themselves they didn’t believe in before… I was lost in the world dance. The memory of the body is different from that of emotion, while Akram started dance when he was five years old. How do you as an adult, after 40 years old, make your body, being and memory work like that? It was a demanding journey but we both embraced it.”
Binoche reveals the backstories and rare dialogues informing the trajectory of the couple’s relationships, drew on personal experiences, with Khan tapping into his Bangladeshi roots and Muslim religion as well as memories of growing up in the U.K. in the 1970s and 80s.
“The young girl running after this man at 14 years old was me at 14 years old when I went to see Casanova in Paris,” says Binoche.
“I fell in love with man who was in front of me, and ran after him. After I realised what I was doing and ran away, but in the show we continue the story and the couple happens.”
Having taken two years out of her acting career to create and then perform the show, Binoche returned to the film set.
She has since racked up more than 40 film and TV credits including Abbas Kiarostami’s 2010 drama Certified Copy, for which won best actress in Cannes; Hollywood blockbuster Godzilla and more recent credits such as Claire Denis’ Let The Sunshine In and France’s 2024 Oscar entry The Taste of Things by Anh Hung Tran.
Binoche says the experience of In-I emboldened her as an actress.
“I felt like nothing could make me frightened anymore because I was freaking out so much before the show, every single night,” she recounts. “I was like trembling and thinking it was going to be the last show ever in my life and that I was going to die, because emotionally it was so demanding and physically it was so demanding.”
The actress says she has not ruled out future directorial projects but emphasizes that her acting career has kept her fulfilled creatively since.
“When you’re an actor, you’re not a puppet. You’re being very creative. You transform yourself, you expose yourself so much. I’ve been lucky enough to work with amazing artists, directors, so I’ve never been frustrated as an actor,” she says.
“I don’t know whether I’m going to direct other films or not. Of course, I have ideas, and I have dreams and through this experience, I discovered a whole different point of view and that’s what I really enjoyed,” she continues, adding that one of the joys of making the film was learning about the technical aspects of sound and editing.
“I had amazing technicians… of course, seeing this ignites the need to do more. It feels like I want to do more but we’ll see because, you know, I’m not the God of my life.”
In-I in Motion world premieres as a non-competitive special screening in San Sebastian on Saturday evening.
The post Juliette Binoche Talks Robert Redford Connection To San Sebastian Film ‘In-I In Motion’; Pushing Herself To The Limit & Future Directing Ambitions appeared first on Deadline.
