"I can't talk about it, it cracks me up. There was a child ... Some other people were supposed to get on the boat, and they couldn't because it was too heavy, there were too many people on it. And the mother decided to drown" - she is wrestling with sobs now - "put herself in the water, to let the other children live. That for me is amazing." She falls silent for a long, suitably Gallic pause, her pupils flickering to the left and the right in agitation as she looks off into the middle distance, rudely interrupted by the wall behind my head.
It is utterly confounding to watch Juliette Binoche cry up close. It may be because it feels so familiar - she would doubtless consider her choice of roles diverse, but in the 20-odd-year sweep of her career she has shown a particular facility for tragedy. Most of her best and best-known roles have been women who, at some point, are shaped by sorrow:
Tereza, the unhappy waitress and wife in The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Michele, the homeless painter going blind in Leos Carax's Les Amants du Pont-Neuf; her Oscar-winning role as Hana, the nurse in The English Patient; the bewildered wife dealing with a stalker and a disintegrating marriage in last year's Hidden. There is a moment in Kieslowski's Three Colours: Blue, perhaps her greatest role and the one that made her a star, in which her character lies under a blanket, watching a video of her husband and daughter's funeral - she has been too badly injured in the crash that killed them to attend in person. Her face is almost immobile; and then there is a sudden, tiny pucker of her cheek that could knock you flat with the force of its grief.
But Binoche's tears are also astonishing because, frankly, interviews with famous actors in bland hotel rooms to promote their latest movies are not experiences that generally lend themselves to high emotion. Binoche is not the prickly subject that some who have encountered her describe, but she's a little cool, perhaps understandably. So it is fair to say I do not expect her to break down over the sort of anecdote that she must, on days like this, unearth and offer up to strangers countless times. It half occurs to me that she's acting it, and though I can't really believe that she has either the cynicism or the energy to bother, it's certainly deeply odd.
We are talking about motherhood because Breaking and Entering, her new movie, has a lot to say about the subject. Binoche plays Amira, a Bosnian refugee who fled Sarajevo with her son Miro, and now picks up work where she can as a seamstress in north London. After catching Miro breaking into his office, Will (Jude Law) follows him home, later engineering a meeting with Amira. The pair embark on an affair, Amira hoping to prevent Will from reporting Miro to the police. Will lives with another woman, Liv (Robin Wright Penn), but feels shut out by her closeness to her autistic daughter. He is squeezed between two women who have forged infinitely stronger relationships with their children than he can with them, a mystery he is unable to crack. At one point, pivotally, Binoche's character says to him: "You must know about mothers: they'll do anything to protect their children."
"I think that's true," Binoche says emphatically when I mention the line. She has two children, about whom she absolutely refuses to talk, and it occurs to me that she might be warning me off.
Binoche's own mother divorced her father when the actor was four and placed her in a boarding school, an experience she has said she can scarcely believe she survived. I mention that I found the line slightly crude, a view of motherhood that felt like the sort of thing someone who wasn't a mother might write for a movie. "Yes, I understand what you are saying." A long pause, while the eyes flicker again at something unseen over my shoulder. "It depends on mothers, maybe." And then she tells her story about the Titanic.
Breaking and Entering was written and directed by Anthony Minghella, the first time he and Binoche have worked together since The English Patient. It is a very different film; instead of the sweeping deserts of North Africa, Minghella has set his drama on the building sites transforming the seedy streets around King's Cross, and in sentiment it is very north London. Will works as a landscape architect, and the film declares its interest in what happens to a city and its underclass when it is "regenerated" by the well-meaning but slightly guilt-struck. It has much more in common with Truly, Madly, Deeply, Minghella's equally well-intentioned 1991 north London ghost fantasy, than the English Patient. (Minghella tips the former a wink by casting Juliet Stevenson, who had a memorably tearful scene with her therapist in the film, in a cameo role as Liv's counsellor.)
The film is not shy of its big themes - "cleaning up" an area pushes the invisible underclass to colonise another part of the city; crimes that fling rich and poor together result in "something [getting] smashed that's not just windows". At one point, Binoche's character actually says that "stealing someone's heart is the real crime". "Well, Anthony has that," Binoche says, then smiles. "He is like that. And you can't deny the human being you are. That there's a need of being moral somehow. And that's him. You have to allow the human being to be." In any case, she says with a little shrug, "it wasn't my concern because at the end he is editing, and this film has to belong to him. As well to me, but in a different way."
Making the two films with Minghella was a surprisingly similar experience, she insists, and yet she doesn't describe it that way. "On English Patient I was trembling the first month of shooting, I was always like" - she holds out her hand and quivers it - "a sheet of paper. You know. I felt my weaknesses, I felt so fragile ... Because of the trust Anthony gave me on The English Patient, it is like a moment I will never forget. Before a scene, for example, he wouldn't say words, he would say 'Fly!'" She flaps her arms, with a great big wide grin. "Fly! And I understood what he meant, because it was like, OK, getting into a void of not knowing what was going to happen. It's so frightening."
She has just finished a film called Orsay, with the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, which was fully improvised. "Before a shot you don't know where the camera is going to shoot and you don't know where you are supposed to be in the room. There's no mark, and you don't have the dialogue written." That kind of challenge is "now such a need for me as an actress. It becomes so much more [about] making movies out of trust and not out of fear. Because you have to trust that it's going to happen, the impossible is going to happen." She leans out of her chair and reaches for a terribly French, skinny white cigarette. "Is it OK if I ..."
She is assured enough of her clout in the industry to feel she has no reason to fear for her career. Today she is a frankly alarming, scorched platinum blonde, tufts of which she clasps distractedly in her hands. Despite it, she looks, even at a distance of a few feet, a decade younger than her 42 years, that luscious mouth as captivating as it ever was, to the point where you can catch yourself staring from time to time. All the same, she acknowledges that her roles tend to be mothers these days more often than lovers, a transition that not every actress regards with equanimity. Binoche, though, is pointedly bored by the suggestion that the roles, after a certain point, become scarcer or more limiting. "No, I have too many projects on the go." Can she appreciate that that might not be the experience of other women in the industry who are less privileged? "I see it more in journalists' questions than in reality. I don't have that problem."
In any case, she says in passing as we part, it would be dreadful to be 20 for your entire life. "I had a doctor-acupuncturist and she told me that sometimes when she has suicidal cases, she says to them: 'Stay alive, it's better than suicide because it's slow suicide, and it's kind of an abdication of your own self,' you know!" And she breaks into a cackle that comes out of the blue and hits you like a car.
"It's true! You're losing your teeth, you're losing your hearing, you're losing your body, it's degrading, bit by bit. Slowly. It's the best way. You wanna commit suicide, stay alive!" And her laughter is scarcely less perplexing than her tears.
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