Why French film icon Juliette Binoche isn’t worried about AI replacing human talent

After more than four decades of working with world-renowned European auteurs, from Krzysztof Kieślowski and Michael Haneke to Olivier Assayas and Claire Denis, French actress Juliette Binoche has simple advice for creating great art that moves people: be very human and trust one’s intuition. “The purpose of films is to transform the audience so they become richer at the end of watching a film. It is nourishing their soul and putting questions in their lives,” she says in an interview at the 50th Hong Kong International Film Festival. “From my experience, when you start with the body, you’re usually not wrong, acting-wise. It’s always truthful. “If you’re too much in your head and don’t relate it to your body, acting becomes nothing; it becomes something intellectual that you don’t actually receive as an audience.” Binoche is now an advocate for the physical experience, but it has not always been that way. She shares that she began her career as a “line-obsessed” actress who deeply feared forgetting her lines, but later sometimes tried going into scenes without preparation to “jump into a place that made me very uncomfortable”. “To actually decide not to learn the lines was really dangerous for me, and it was interesting,” she says. “You feel what you need or don’t need. It’s not rational. It’s like painting, in a way; you just go with what you connect with.” In 2007, without any formal dance training, she partnered with British-Bangladeshi choreographer Akram Khan – who, in 2024, received an honorary fellowship from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts – for a modern dance piece titled In-I. With a set designed by British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor, the bold performance teetered on the boundaries between theatre and dance. Its two-year world tour premiered at the Royal National Theatre in London in the autumn of 2008, and, according to Binoche, ran for 120 shows, including two in Hong Kong in 2009. She recalls that when In-I travelled to New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music, Robert Redford showed up unannounced at her dressing room after seeing the show. “I was shocked,” she says. “He said, ‘You’ve got to make a film out of this show.’ He repeated it over and over, and I said, ‘Yes, yes, yes, I know, I know, I know.’ We were about to finish the show a month later, but I kept that in my mind and asked my sister to film the last seven shows. She came to the rehearsals. I had those tapes for 15 years.” Despite all her experience in the industry, obtaining the resources to make a film was “a whole [different] thing”, Binoche says. It was only about three years ago, when a financier and producer reached out to her, that she got to turn her and Khan’s stage collaboration into her directorial debut, In-I In Motion, which premiered at the San Sebastian International Film Festival in September 2025. Her sister, Marion Stalens – a photographer and documentary filmmaker who has also made a few supporting appearances in major films, such as Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Red (1994) – is credited as the cinematographer in the documentary. Binoche calls herself “half a director” for In-I In Motion, which details her foray into a new art form as she worked to unlearn what she knew about performance through self-exploration and a new kind of sensory perception. “As an actress, I know that you start with the sensation, and that brings the emotion, then that brings the need of playing, of acting; but making a movement out of this – I had never done before,” she says. “What I mean by the body is what’s in it – what we call ‘gut feelings’. It’s the experience of the cells … but how do you start with the body? That’s really a key question to any art. “In my film, I start with [acting coach] Susan Batson saying, ‘Go with the sensation. Don’t try to force it, don’t make it, because it’s not where it’s coming from.’” Binoche’s multidisciplinary artistic practice comes from an intuitive state of creation. Even when asked what she learned from esteemed auteurs to help her direct and edit In-I In Motion, she still stresses following her instincts to avoid losing track of “what’s underneath … you want the underneath and to keep the underneath until the end”. In many ways, the arts are a profoundly human pursuit, one that is increasingly threatened in 2026 by the rise of generative AI. Does Binoche worry about the streaming giants and their use of artificial intelligence in filmmaking? At a post-Three Colours: Blue master class moderated by Hong Kong media personality Cheuk Wan-chi at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre on April 11, the actress said that she does not, because it is “artificial intelligence, not human intelligence, not emotional intelligence, not spiritual intelligence”. At our interview, Binoche says that she picks her own media consumption with caution. “I don’t want to spoil my attention [with] places that are meaningless. Life is too precious and too short,” the 62-year-old says, “even [shorter] for me now. “But even when I was 20 years old, I felt that I didn’t want to ‘spread’ my time and emotions on things that were not worth it. You’ve got to choose what you’re watching and hearing, because it’s gonna be in you and get in your unconscious and your dreams and your being.” Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook

Why French film icon Juliette Binoche isn’t worried about AI replacing human talent

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Humanity and intuition are the secrets to great art, according to Juliette Binoche, who talks about her directorial debut In-I In Motion

Humanity and intuition are the secrets to great art, according to Juliette Binoche, who talks about her directorial debut In-I In Motion