MENTIONS: Kellan Lutz, Juliette Binoche, Olivier Assayas Mention Kristen Stewart

  

Kellan Lutz:

I actually just wrote a piece for ELLE.com about how people are afraid to love Kristen Stewart because of her public persona, but if you look at her work in Still Alice…

I wanted that role of the brother so bad...

Did you?


Brilliant script. Everyone killed it. I mean, what a great movie. I read the script and I was like, 'I want this.' I even hit Kristen up and was like, 'Put in a good word!' But, regarding Kristen, you know, I'm proud of her for being herself. Times have changed now—there's a lot of invasion of privacy and a lot of ruined moments. What [the paparazzi] take, capture, and release is often taken as a reflection of who that person is.

Juliette Binoche:

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She and Stewart had a very different approach to acting in their many scenes together. "Kristen doesn't prepare," Binoche says. "She reads the scene a few times and then she knows it. She has this ability to know it and then she goes with her guts."


And what does Binoche do?

"I provoke, I tease her," she says. "I do both. It depends on the role. It depends on the script. It depends on the time I have. This one I had some time and I had a lot of lines so I had to work a lot in advance."

Ask about playing a famous actress and Binoche laughs, pointing out that Stewart is far more famous than she is.

"Having Kristen as my assistant – being over famous – everything had different values," she says. "For me, that was the irony of the whole situation."

This creative friction was not exclusively confined to the screen. Binoche explains that she likes to rehearse whereas her co-star does not. Instead, she says, the 25-year-old Stewart would read over the scene a few minutes before the camera rolled and that this worked best for the character; it kept Valentine feeling fresh and spontaneous. “It was her way of dealing with her fear,” she adds.

Somewhere around the middle of the film there is a telling moment when the women bathe in a secluded Swiss lake. Binoche strips off and strolls into the water without a care in the world. But Stewart is mindful to keep her underwear on. It strikes me that this scene might highlight another difference between their approaches – pitting uninhibited France against image-conscious Hollywood.

Binoche laughs; she’s not entirely sure. “We didn’t discuss any of that beforehand. I didn’t know whether Kristen was going to be naked or not. But I think the choice was more natural than you think it was. The characters are alone by the lake. There’s some kind of seduction going on. My character is more free so it was not right being cautious. But maybe the assistant wants to protect herself. So her decision made sense to me. I can explain it that way.”


She concedes, however, that they arrived at the film from vastly different directions. Stewart remains best remembered for her role as Bella Swan in the phenomenally popular Twilight franchise. Binoche, by contrast, famously turned down Jurassic Park in order to work with the Polish film-maker Krzysztof Kieslowski. “It’s true – I made a clear decision of not going to America and staying in France,” she says. “Kristen started very early and took off with an explosion in the teenager world. I was always more interested in journalists recognising my work. So we have different stories, but it’s not better or worse. You choose your own path and hopefully meet up in the middle.”

Olivier Assayas: 

“I first saw Kristen in Into the Wild as a teenager and I was struck by her, she was amazing, she stands out.” he said. “ I saw her in The Runaways and I believed in her. I didn’t like the film at all, but she was genuine, she was real. So now I read here and there that people are surprised at how good she is, how they didn’t imagine it – for me, I never questioned the fact she was the greatest actress of her generation. To me, it was always completely clear she was an amazing actress. But I had no idea she was that good, I was amazed by some of the stuff she did. Which I really discovered in the editing because it’s very subtle. She does tiny things, she’s a master of her craft. I loved her, I loved what she was doing, I just didn’t realise until the editing room how extraordinary it was.”

Assayas does admit, however, that initially he had Stewart down for the role of Jo-Ann, a young, American diva who is to star in the play alongside Binoche, taking on her former part – a role that now belongs to Chloe Grace Moretz. However it was actually Stewart’s idea to try something a bit different.

“When I started working on the film and imagining who would be who, I first imagined Kristen as Jo-Ann, which is closer to the fantasy we have of her – but in the first conversation I had with her, she said that the character was boring for her, it was too close,” he continued. “She didn’t feel at ease with it, and asked to be considered for Valentine and I hadn’t thought of it, honestly. And I told her I was already discussing the role with Mia Wasikowska, but it stayed with me, and at some point I realised, actually she’s right. The part of Valentine will give her the possibility to do something she’s never done, to be in a position nobody has seen her in before, so I understood why it was exciting for her. It came from her, she understood it before I did.”

Assayas’ films, by their very nature, tend to be slow-burning, pensive affairs, studies of character, of society. His latest is no different, and while he’s evidently aware that having Stewart take on a leading role potentially opens his film out to a whole new audience and demographic – it’s not one he’s expecting to be entirely receptive.

“They will hate it,” he laughed. “Maybe a fraction of them will like it, but they’ll be horribly bored. It’s difficult to access that Twilight audience, because they’re so young. They wouldn’t be interested in a movie like this. They’ll be aware it exists and they’ll see photos, but they’re more interested in the tweets than the film.”

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Binoche’s performance and byplay with Stewart, best known for her role as Bella Swan of the Twilight series of blockbusters, makes the film feel like a chamber piece compared with some of the director’s more expansive films. Allowing Stewart to bounce off Binoche is a good thing for the American. She is a surprising asset.

“I crossed my fingers but I’ve always been a fan,” Assayas says. “I’ve always been convinced she potentially was a great actress, so choosing her was an easy decision, but the thing is she went beyond what I imagined.”

As he watched the rushes, Assayas was amazed at how Stewart understood the character and its smallest nuances. The contrast between the characters speaks to the contrast between the actresses. Off screen, Binoche liked to rehearse; Stewart did not. On screen, Maria is brittle; Valentine is carefree. Off screen, La Binoche embraces her status as French cinema royalty; Stewart remains that pouting, most reluctant of film stars. On screen, Maria strips blithely for a dip in a Swiss lake; Valentine remains chastely clothed.

Assayas acknowledges the key to the film is the interaction between the actresses.

“Juliette in some way gave [Stewart] something and there was a sort of challenge between the two girls. Juliette is very free, very creative, she’s very inventive, she tries stuff even if it’s absurd. She goes for it and she’s very generous.”

Stewart learned from that, he adds. She appreciated you could work with freedom and spontaneity. “She never really had the space to do that in other movies, so all of a sudden something opened up for her,” Assayas says. Stewart won a Cesar, the French equivalent of the Academy Award, for the performance.

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