Revealing role for an actor

Haneke, she says, knew a little of the difficulties she was going through during Hidden, but she felt no need to tell her fellow cast members about it. And being in the film somehow helped, she says. "While I was in the work, I was in the work and I loved it because I love the experience of acting. It's so amazing. It's like playing ping-pong. It's so in the movement and alive and interesting." But, she says, her role wasn't easy: "I had to reach those terrible feelings of being betrayed and angry. It's not an easy journey. You don't feel good about yourself."

Hidden is the story of lives disrupted by a mystery. An upper-middle-class Parisian couple - Binoche plays the wife, Daniel Auteuil is the husband - discover that they are under video surveillance. Videotapes are left of the exterior of their house. The videos are accompanied by stark childlike drawings.

It begins to look as if the surveillance is related to something in the husband's past: the focus of the film is on him.

Yet there are ambiguities, too, in the role of the wife. Had she been having an affair, had she not? The viewer can decide either way, but it's more interesting to play it as if she had, says Binoche, with another quick burst of laughter - and so, in one scene, she did.

Her wish to work with Haneke came from seeing three of his films. "For me, there was a vision, a clear voice somehow, with a complexity about the world we live in as Westerners. He's picky; he's a little provocative."

His movies are confronting, she knows: "Horrific, but necessary, because they are about the contemporary condition. They're like mirrors."

They reflect, but they also force us to reflect, she believes, on "the materialistic world that imprisons us" and its intrinsic impossibility - "if we continue like that, it's just a suicidal way of looking at life".

Hidden is the story of lives disrupted by a mystery. An upper-middle-class Parisian couple - Binoche plays the wife, Daniel Auteuil is the husband - discover that they are under video surveillance. Videotapes are left of the exterior of their house. The videos are accompanied by stark childlike drawings.

It begins to look as if the surveillance is related to something in the husband's past: the focus of the film is on him.

Yet there are ambiguities, too, in the role of the wife. Had she been having an affair, had she not? The viewer can decide either way, but it's more interesting to play it as if she had, says Binoche, with another quick burst of laughter - and so, in one scene, she did.

Her wish to work with Haneke came from seeing three of his films. "For me, there was a vision, a clear voice somehow, with a complexity about the world we live in as Westerners. He's picky; he's a little provocative."

His movies are confronting, she knows: "Horrific, but necessary, because they are about the contemporary condition. They're like mirrors."

They reflect, but they also force us to reflect, she believes, on "the materialistic world that imprisons us" and its intrinsic impossibility - "if we continue like that, it's just a suicidal way of looking at life".