Was Juliette Binoche wary about acting with her ex? It’s complicated

So much butter! Benoit Magimel loves to eat fine French food – rather too much, as he would frequently say to his director, Tran Anh Hung, while they were making The Taste of Things. He also cooks very well, according to his former real-life partner and on-screen collaborator in this new film, Juliette Binoche. He certainly looks at home with a chef’s knife in his hand. “I started by cooking for women,” he says. “I think it’s great for men to cook, let the women relax – and also to do the dishes.”

The Taste of Things is loosely based on a 1924 novel by Swiss writer Marcel Rouff called The Passionate Epicure, which was in turn very loosely based on the life of famous 19th-century epicurean Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Magimel plays Dodin Bouffant, a gentleman on a country estate who is devoted equally to gastronomy and Eugenie, his cook and lover of 20 years, played by Binoche.

By his own admission, however, the food he and Binoche simulate making in this sumptuous, succulent love story is way out of his league. “I really like to get my hands stuck in,” he says. “I have no fear of guts or anything like that. But you really must know they use so much butter to make this food. Half a kilo for a potato puree! And I learned how you have to work the butter, to clarify it – it is so complex to make even the simplest things. There are things happening there that we just don’t know about.”

Tran Anh Hung was born in Vietnam, where food is as central to life as it is in France; he relishes the fact that his culinary adviser on the film, the Michelin-starred chef Pierre Gagnaire, told him that pot-au-feu – which was this film’s original title – and pho were two versions of the same idea. His family moved to France after the fall of Saigon in 1975, when Hung was 12, but he has a vivid memory of slipping into his mother’s Da Nang kitchen, where boys were not supposed to go, to see what she had bought at the morning market.

Where they lived was ugly and impoverished. Both his parents made clothes for a living. “And not like Dior. They made clothes for workers and for the army, things like that. So I always wondered why I was interested in art.” Now he is convinced it was food; the sight of grey shrimps turning red in a pot was beautiful to him. All directors want to make a film about art one day, he believes. “And gastronomy is an art – an art that deals with taste, smell and touch. Cinema doesn’t usually deal with those senses.”

The Taste of Things begins with a long scene in the kitchen where Eugenie is preparing a feast for Dodin’s regular guests, a coterie of fellow gourmands. He works beside her; they glide around each other gracefully, saying nothing more intimate than “pass the saucepan”, but their complete accord is clear. Binoche and Magimel were together for five years, from 1998 to 2003; their daughter, Hana, is now 25.

“With Benoit, you know, we know each other so it was fun to share it,” says Binoche. “What can I say? I think there was a lot of us in the film. Of course, that’s the deal as an actor. You have to bring your intimacy, you have to bring something that is beyond yourself but is also very much yours, because it becomes more personal, stronger and truer for the audience. You don’t want to ‘play’, or fake things, you want to live them.”

Long before Hung settled on this story, he and Binoche had promised each other that they would work together some day. It took years to find finance for The Taste of Things. “People hesitate, you know,” says Hung. “This movie is about food, it’s about love but about marital love. That’s not sexy, love that lasts long, you know. There’s no passion.” Anyone watching the film now would find that hard to believe – appetite and desire seem to waft through Dodin’s house in a summer haze of perpetual arousal – but it didn’t tick the right boxes.

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While the project crept forward, Hung wondered who could play Dodin. Magimel was his ideal, but Binoche said it was pointless approaching him. “That was my insecurity,” she says. “I thought he wasn’t going to want to work with me. And I was wrong.” After two other actors had been cast and dropped out, Hung asked him and he was enthused. “He said ‘I’m in. I like it very much. And Juliette, wow!’”

When Binoche warned Hung that it could be complicated, he reassured her: “Well, OK, but he was so enthusiastic I really think it will be OK. And then on the first day on the set, seeing the two of them together, I saw that I had my movie.”

Binoche views her projects as collaborations, with the director, other actors and crew. She and Hung had their battles, especially when he asked her to show no emotion. Impossible, she said; get someone else if that’s what you want. “I’m a creator as much as the director is. I am not a tool,” she says. “You’ve got to provoke the director as the director is provoking you in order to go into a vision together, to a place where you lift the potential of the film. Because you’re not being passive. The word is ‘action’! It’s very much about asking ‘what is the truth in this?’”

She sees herself as transparent, the action passing through her. “I don’t know what’s coming up, I’m the spectator of what is happening in me. And sometimes the director doesn’t know what they wrote, exactly. They’re going to discover it as they’re doing it; it reveals itself in a very mysterious way. And in this story, about a couple having lived together and worked together for 20 years with Benoit and myself, who had a child 25 years before – that’s not a simple thing.”

Eugenie has a similar sense of purpose; for most of their time together, she refuses to marry Dodin or sleep in the master bedroom, preferring her smaller servant’s room. He may visit to find the door locked or unlocked, as she pleases; she has no wifely duties.

“He is always looking for her, but she has this way of escaping,” says Magimel. She is in the garden; she is in her bath; she is in the kitchen while he entertains. Most of all, she is content being the cook.

“Because I think that’s her path, her task, her decision,” says Binoche. “She had the free choice to be this cook, serving and creating. It makes her independent, for sure, but it makes her valuable. Because being the wife of, it’s been centuries of ‘being the wife of’ and it still is. I think you have to recognise what you’re here for, women and men, because that gives you a path into the world, to know yourself and be part of a bigger space.”

Magimel says he was very moved as he saw Dodin and Eugenie’s story play out the first time he saw the film. “I don’t know if that is linked to my personal story,” he says. “I tend to cry easily as it is, but it absolutely bowled me over.”

The Taste of Things is in cinemas from May 2.