“I like taking risks. I love going into adventures,” Oscar winner Juliette Binoche observes. “Taking risks is part of being an artist.”
In 2007, the French actress embarked on one of the riskiest endeavors of her career, creating a modern dance piece called In-I with British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan that would take them on a world tour together. Before the project, Binoche had never trained as a dancer. It easily could have resulted in failure.
“How could I, an actress, find the strength and courage without a dancer’s body?” Binoche has written. “How to commit to a performance that left me breathless, believing I could make it through to the end without collapsing?”
Khan, too, faced enormous challenges: “Akram wanted to know about acting, wanted to act and open himself up,” Binoche tells Deadline. “And it’s very difficult.”
Binoche explores that groundbreaking production in her directorial debut, In-I In Motion, a documentary that screens later today at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. She headed to Denmark after screening the film at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece, where she also participated in a talk moderated by the festival’s Head of Program, Yorgos Krassakopoulos.
Sitting down with Deadline at the Mediterranean Palace Hotel in Thessaloniki, Binoche shared the unusual origin story of In-I almost two decades ago.
“I was being massaged in London by my trainer, Su-Man Hsu… And as she was massaging me, she said, ‘Do you want to dance?’ And I said out of the blue, my head inside of the hole of the massage table, ‘Yes!’ Without thinking, just a big ‘yes.’ And then at the end of our session, she said, ‘I’d like to invite you to see Akram Khan’s show in London, Zero Degree. And so I went to see it. I was mesmerized by his presence on stage and the way he was turning, like infinite turns. I was fascinated by his talent and his skills. When we met at the end of the show, he said, ‘Do you want to have two days in a studio and see if we could work something together? Would you be interested?’ And I said, ‘Of course, I’d love that.’”
Eventually, they decided to co-create a stage production that would combine dance and acting. But they only had six months to get it ready before opening in London.
“I am not [a dancer],” Binoche says. “I was not, and I didn’t become one. I tried just to sustain the demands as much as I could. Of course, I knew I had to transform and it was going to require time and patience and love at the same time. But my force was that I had a trainer that believed in me, Su-Man… She knew that the body can listen. The body can transform if you give faith, love, and care, and regularity work. She trained me to be able to actually sustain a show of an hour, a little more than an hour, and to keep up with Akram.”
She adds, “But of course, Akram slowed down because he’s a very quick dancer, especially at the end [of the piece]. So, he had to abandon his body in a certain way in order for me to catch up with him and be able to move.”
Another key collaborator on the project became Susan Batson, the famed acting coach.
“We asked Susan to come and she, with her genius — because there’s no other word — was able to help us in finding the major link, the bridge between acting and dancing, which is starting with a sensation. Starting with a sensation, you allow yourself to feel a subject you’re choosing and to let it operate instead of you. It’s not your will, it’s not your projections, it’s not your needs,” Binoche says. “And you just allow yourself to be in touch with that place called sensation, and that’s going to take you into movement. And that was the real link between acting and dancing that was more than smart — it was genius, a spark of understanding what could help us to link our different artistic forms.”
There were other barriers to surmount for the collaboration of Binoche and Khan to succeed, relating to race, gender, and privilege. Khan is Muslim, of Bangladeshi descent.
“We had to overcome a lot of fears. And one he had was that I was white and one I had was he was male. And so, finding this balance between us took us a while and we went through tensions, we went through many different layers of feelings,” she recalls. “But I think at the end of the day, at the end of the rehearsals, there was a sisterhood, a brotherhood that really existed.”
Were it not for an encounter with the late Robert Redford, the documentary on In-I might never have happened.
“Towards the end of the tour, we went to BAM Theater [in New York] to do it there and Robert Redford came and at the end of the show we were walking back to our dressing rooms, Akram, myself, coming off stage. And Robert Redford was waiting at my door,” Binoche remembers. “He took me inside of my dressing room and closed the door and said, ‘You’ve got to make a film out of the show.’ And he repeated that several times and I said, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ Because I knew he was right, but I didn’t know how I was going to do it.”
Binoche’s sister, filmmaker Marion Stalens, had shot many hours of the rehearsals, capturing the show as it evolved, and the contributions of Batson and Hsu. That footage would become vital to the documentary. Binoche also asked her sister to film the last seven performances of In-I in Paris. Following that, it took a long time for the documentary to come to fruition.
“I was working so much for 15 years, and I didn’t know how to [make] it because I didn’t have a production [company]. I didn’t know how to find the editor or how to work that out,” she notes. “[Then] two and a half years ago, a financier and a producer, they came to me and they asked me if I had a project that I wanted to do and I said, ‘Well, I have those tapes I’d like to edit.’ And so, it started like that.”
In-I In Motion premiered at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in Spain. To screen at TiDF in Thessaloniki and CPH:DOX in Copenhagen represents another distinction because both festivals are devoted exclusively to nonfiction film.
“It’s new and it’s wonderful,” Binoche says of being immersed in the nonfiction film community. “I think documentaries are very needed in our world to try and find the truth because [of] AI and the new way of creating and where is the false and where’s the truth and where is the invented illusion. So, I think documentaries in that way are very important because also they have the time to develop a subject matter and to go into it. So, I’m thrilled to be honored to be selected in those festivals.”
In-I In Motion opens a rare window onto the creative process. Binoche says taking the risk to create the show changed her in certain ways.
“Mainly, what it was is my relationship to fear, because I’ve been through so many frightening experiences and feeling, am I going to survive this?” she notes. “Because the show was so demanding. It was kind of brutal on a certain level and emotionally so demanding. I’ve eaten so much fear that it somehow gave me a sort of vaccination about fear. And so, there’s not a lot that’s going to frighten me.”
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