Working in France (and outside of Asia) for the first time, Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien couldn’t have made a more appropriate casting decision than Juliette Binoche. Besides being one of world cinema’s most famous faces for two decades, Binoche remains uncommonly adventurous for such a major star. Hollywood projects such as Chocolat and Dan in Real Life are outnumbered on her CV by films with some of the world’s most revered directors, Binoche having followed indelible early performances for Leos Carax and Krzysztof Kieslowski with more recent turns for Michael Haneke (Caché), Abel Ferrara (Mary) and Abbas Kiarostami (the forthcoming The Certified Copy).
But even after all those experiences, working with Hou on Flight of the Red Balloon — which starts a two-week run at the Royal  this weekend — presented particular challenges. Like most of his films, Hou’s first European-made feature is dominated by lengthy scenes in which the characters gradually reveal themselves in tiny, subtle increments.

Binoche plays Suzanne, a puppeteer whose life is thrown into disarray by work on a new show. To take care of her young son Simon (Simon Iteanu), she hires Song (Fang Song), a nanny who’s also studying film. As Suzanne’s life grows ever more hectic, Song engages Simon in a more contemplative pursuit: the making of a homage to The Red Balloon, Albert Lamorisse’s beloved 1956 short film about a Parisian lad and his inflatable pal. Following suit, Hou occasionally subverts the convincing air of naturalism with fantastical elements he similarly borrows from Lamorisse.
In an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, Binoche expresses her enthusiasm for Hou’s open-ended approach. “It was completely improvised,” says the 44-year-old star. “It opened a field for me. When you explore something in acting, you discover something in yourself. It always stays with you, no matter how many years pass. It’s adding to your capacity and perception and knowledge somehow, even though the best acting comes when you forget everything.”

Binoche’s eyes widen at the question of whether she could tell when Hou would deem a particular take of a scene the right one. “There was only one take,” she says. Nor did she know how scenes would start and end, a prospect that would leave most performers feeling equally excited and terrified. “I was never terrified,” she admits. “Excited, yes.”

By the time they came to shoot the scenes, they’d already discussed Suzanne in great detail, Hou having encouraged Binoche to develop the character herself. “He comes with ideas but I’d say he’s not sure of anything,” she says of Hou’s initial instructions. “He’s just walking toward the film. At the beginning, I asked him, ‘How shall I prepare for this movie?’ He said, ‘Well, you’ll be working with puppets.’ So I bought a lot of books about puppets and looked at the different traditions and I met with a puppet director. I even had people coming into my garden doing a puppet show so I could try to figure it out.

“Then when he came back to Paris, he said, ‘No, no, no, don’t worry about all this. It’s great that you have knowledge about this but it’s not that necessary.’ Two weeks before shooting he asked me to work with puppet makers and to create a 20-minute show. You only see little bits in the movie but there was a full beginning, middle and end that we had to create.”

Through this accretion of vignettes from Suzanne’s professional and personal life, Hou and Binoche create a richly textured character who seems quintessentially Gallic yet also shares the ruminative quality Hou elicits from his performers and his audiences alike. Binoche praises the director’s forte for “silent moments or nothing moments.” As she says, “It’s about not trying to push, not trying to explain, not trying to be too active. It’s like this Taoist perspective on life — you can’t have a full moment without having that space around it.”