Juliette Binoche is not usually in light hearted comic fare. Sure, there as Chocolat, but many more Blues and Damages and English Patients. Dan in Real Life comes after another slew of serious foreign films for Binoche.
Binoche Tries Humor With Dan in Real Life
"It was more difficult in a way because it’s like breaking the rule of my other films, where I just plunge into it with a sort of an artistic rage somehow," said Binoche. "This one I had to somehow have the horse inside me, but just controlling it a little more. I had to adjust myself because after the Hou Hsiao-hsien film I was completely free, like not having any dialogue or anything. Suddenly I was like, ‘Okay this is page one. All the words have to be there.’ So it was like an adjustment I had to make."
Binoche plays Marie, a dream girl that Dan Burns (Steve Carell) meets on a family reunion vacation. The problem is, she's his brother's girlfriend. "She’s an angel. She’s playing the angel because I think inside her there’s so many needs unfulfilled. She’s like an orphan in need of family. So this big house with a whole bunch of kids and good atmosphere just fulfils some kind of emptiness she feels. But I think that she needs to be perfect to hide her real person somehow, the fragility. She needs to hide it."
Dan in Real Life
Dan in Real Life
The consummate professional, Binoche came up with far more backstory for Marie than was provided by the script. "I had to. You have to. Even though it’s a comedy and all that, it has to be grounded. Since then I shot three movies but from what I remember, I think she was an abandoned child, from was it the father? I don’t know what I decided. But she was abandoned and that she had a French mother and an American father or something like that. And she learned to live on her own very, very early on and fathered herself really. That’s what I decided on."
Director Peter Hedges got all the actors together to play family before the film started. Binoche got something a little different out of it. "I understand it because it’s like theatre. You have to make a family and take the time for it and play around. So we had to write one another’s stories and we had to sing together and dance together again and there were games made because I had to learn all the games. I didn’t know. It’s very American, the bowling, the pancakes, so it was a process of me becoming an American."
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