[PIFF] Juliette Binoche inspired director of "Certified Copy"

French actress Juliette Binoche attends a press conference for film "Certified Copy" held at Shinsegae Department Store's Cultural Hall in Busan, South Korea on October 12, 2010. [Chae Ki-won/10Asia]

When it comes to France's multiple award-winner Juliette Binoche, it seems that critically acclaimed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami is inspired by the actress as much as she is inspired by him.

Speaking to reporters at the Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF) ongoing at Korea’s second-largest city Busan, Kiarostami said he found himself completing the storyline for “Certified Copy” while explaining the movie to the French award-winning actress.

“It was short and incomplete in my mind but when I was telling her, she was showing a lot of attention to my story so it made me tell the story longer and longer which ended up becoming the story you see in the film,” explained Kiarostami.

He then jokingly added it took him two and a half months to write a different script thereafter “because Binoche wasn’t there” -- it had taken him only 45 minutes to complete the plot for “Certified Copy” when sitting with her.

And while Kiarostami has won countless numbers of international awards during his 30-year career, he said it was his first time working with a star, which he described as “a very new experience.”

“There was some sort of special acting that was coming from that technical experience she’s had…… She was making the dialogue her own and bringing it out, as if she was the one coming up with the dialogue,” he remarked.

He also left it up to her to lead her co-star William Shimell, a British opera singer who was taking his first attempt at acting. “His acting is your responsibility. You know how to act so it’s all yours,” Binoche, also in Busan for PIFF mimicked Kiarostami as having said.

“But knowing that Abbas was giving me that kind of weight was also great,” the actress said of her experience of working on the film which won her best actress at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

“I won’t forget the experience……. It created something special, the experience of life and that’s what I want to experience as an actress. The freedom I get, I hope it provokes people’s way of choosing films and life being.”

In “Certified Copy,” set in Tuscany of Italy, a French antiques dealer (Binoche) and a British writer (Shimell) spend a day together during which they feign marriage. As the story develops, the two engage in dialogue as if they are an actual husband and wife.

Reporter : Jessica Kim jesskim@
Photographer : Chae ki-won ten@