Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda dares to find the truth

For the first time in his esteemed career, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda left his homeland to work his magic in France.

Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche star as mother and daughter in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth is his first film shot in France, and it pairs Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche as mother and daughter. It began, Kore-eda says, speaking through an interpreter, as “a story about the relationship between the living and the dead”, but it accumulated new layers of meaning and authenticity along the way.

Deneuve plays Fabienne, an imperious, legendary actress who has just published her memoirs. Binoche is Lumir, Fabienne’s screenwriter daughter, who lives in the US with her husband, Hank (Ethan Hawke), a TV actor.

Lumir has come to Paris to visit, accompanied by Hank and their young daughter, Charlotte (Clementine Grenier). Lumir hasn’t read the autobiography, although she had asked to see it before publication.

Once she arrives, she’s taken aback by what the book contains, and also by what it omits. Staying with her mother in the family home, the place where she grew up, old differences emerge and conflicting versions of the past become apparent.

Meanwhile, Fabienne is about to start work on a new film, a work of poetic science fiction about a mother and a daughter.

It stars a young woman, Manon (Manon Clavel) who bears a strong, much remarked-upon resemblance to an actress from another era — someone from Fabienne’s past who is barely mentioned in the memoir.

Gently but inexorably, fault lines emerge in the relationships within the film, as well as points of unexpected connection.

Juliette Binoche, left, Catherine Deneuve, Ethan Hawke and Clementine Grenier in The Truth.

Familiar elements from Kore-eda’s previous works become apparent: themes of family, memory, the nature of mourning, the different versions of events that individuals hold onto.

His previous feature, Shoplifters, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year, was a clever, disconcerting tale about an informal, artificially created “family” and their survival ruses.

In Our Little Sister (2015), three siblings meet a half-sister for the first time; in Nobody Knows (2004), four young children fend for themselves when their mother fails to return home.

In Still Walking (2008) a family mourns the loss of a beloved son in ways that impose covert pressure on those who remain.

In After Life (1998) the dead have a week in purgatory and the chance to select a single memory to retain for eternity.

The Truth might seem a lighter work in many ways: it’s funny and rueful and it gives Deneuve a role that she inhabits with a kind of gloriously offhand certainty. Fabienne is a wilful, driven, self-absorbed figure whose moments of insecurity and doubt only make her more determined to carry on as before. She puts her vocation as an actress beyond everything.

Yet The Truth is also a poignant depiction of characters who find themselves re-evaluating and reconsidering their lives, compromising in ways they might not have anticipated. It’s about redefining and letting go. It’s also a film that explores, almost inevitably given its subject matter, the nature of performance on and off screen.

Kore-eda had never considered making a film overseas, he says. A few years ago, Binoche contacted him: she often gets in touch with directors she is interested in working with. At the time, he says, he wasn’t sure what to think. “I’m monolingual, I just speak Japanese, in fact, I had only made films in Tokyo up until that point. I thought, ‘well, I think she’s just being polite’.

“But after that I ran into quite a number of French people at various international festivals and they would extend an invitation for me to work in France. Francois Ozon, when he came to Tokyo, said to me, ‘Look, I think you could make something good in France’.” And at that point, he began to take the idea more seriously.

Binoche and Hawke.

In 2015, when he was contemplating in earnest the idea of making a film in France, he went back to a much earlier project, a play script he had been working on.

“It was going to be about a grande dame, an actress at a late stage in her career, and she was backstage trying to get her head around a role. But she’s also haunted by memories of a rival from her youth, someone who had passed away.” The project didn’t really come together, he says, so he put it aside.

Returning to the subject, and contemplating the nature of performance, he says, he sent the script to Deneuve. In the end, he says, he found himself making his movie with what he calls “my dream team”: Deneuve, Binoche and Hawke.

As part of his preparation, he talked to Deneuve and Binoche about acting. He asked them about early roles, about upbringing and influences. He even cast the net a little wider. “When Isabelle Huppert came to Japan, I also had the opportunity to interview her and get her thoughts on the topic.

“I asked Isabelle Huppert about how she gets on top of a role, and she said, ‘It starts with the shoes. Once you have the right shoes for the character, you will walk the way the shoes determine. Once you have that, it will determine the wardrobe, and once you have that, you’re on your way to putting together what is important about how to perform the character’.

“Juliette Binoche says she’s a method actor, and she goes back to her childhood, digs up a piece of trauma and transplants it into the present. She works on the inside a lot to bring about her performances.

“And Catherine Deneuve is like neither of those two. She is more intuitive. So she’ll turn up on set and she might look at the weather, and the way someone is throwing their lines at her and she will respond. She will go from there, that’s how she feels the character.”

Yet there are ways in which Deneuve is utterly consistent. “If you’re working with Juliette Binoche, her normal persona is boisterous and full of laughter but when it’s time to shoot, she shuts it all down and becomes the character and it’s a different person in front of the lens.”

Deneuve, on the other hand, is “a phenomenon”, someone “whose talent simply manifests itself … she’s hyperactive, she’s like a child. And from the moment she turns up on set and says ‘hi’, to when she leaves, she doesn’t change.”

In making The Truth, Kore-eda creates a sense of the cinematic world Fabienne inhabits — its past, as well as its present.

There are names of fictional films, directors and actors scattered through the movie, as well as real ones. The real lends authenticity to the fictional, “but they have to be in the same world so there’s an ambiguity”, Kore-eda says.

We also go on set to watch the production of the film that Fabienne is making, a process that adds another layer of verisimilitude. This imaginary movie is based on Memories Of My Mother, a micro-story by American science fiction and fantasy author Ken Liu. Its premise tangles and complicates the relationship between mother and daughter, youth and age: its filming poses challenges and opportunities for Fabienne.

When Kore-eda wrote his play, back in 2003, he says, “the work that the actress was tangling with was going to be a stage adaptation of Raymond Carver’s Cathedral”. But he couldn’t have used this for The Truth. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 2014 feature, Birdman — which takes place during a Broadway production of a Carver short story — put paid to that idea, he says, “even though I thought of it first!”.

He started looking for a new element for this film within a film, and came across Liu’s story, which turned out to be a perfect counterpoint to the events unfolding in the rest of the film.

When it came to casting the actress to play Manon, the young woman who looks like a doppelganger of the figure from Fabienne’s past, Kore-eda didn’t want an established name.

“I had it in mind that I wanted to break a rookie for that role,” he says. “So six months prior to production we went and auditioned a whole bunch of actresses. I got them to play one scene from something that I’d written, a scene from (Francois Ozon’s) Swimming Pool and one from Clouds Of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas’s 2014 film, starring Binoche and Kristen Stewart, a film about performance, ambiguity and self-doubt). He knew immediately, he says, that Clavel was the one.

“She was head and shoulders above all the rest. And she had a tremendous facility with her voice.”

Kore-eda came prepared for the challenges he faced making The Truth, he says. Ozon had warned him, he says, of one in particular.

“You have Catherine Deneuve, and people will tell you she will be a diva,” Ozon told him. “But she will give you absolutely everything, because that’s what she does with her projects, she gives herself over to them.”

The biggest problem, Ozon told him, would become apparent in the editing suite. In your mother tongue, he said to Kore-eda, you know where to cut, but in another language, you don’t know where the emphasis on a line is falling.

Kore-eda, who edits his own work, understood exactly what he meant. “I had to call in my interpreter and my assistant editors and get them to check, point by point, which were the bits that were not working for French speakers. So I could fix it, and know exactly where the cut should go.”

The Truth might have been made in French, but the filmmaker knows there are elements that Japanese audiences will read in a certain way. One of them, it turns out, is a dress that plays a small but significant symbolic role in the film. A chic black 60s dress with a while collar sends an unmistakeable message.

“In Japan,” Kore-eda says, “we mourn the dead wearing black with white trim.”

The Truth opens on Boxing Day.