Juliette Binoche has admitted she does not like to look back at her career.

In her new film, Clouds Of Sils Maria, she plays a famous actress who is persuaded to remake her debut film. Except, instead of playing the vampish young assistant again, this time she must play the older employer the assistant seduces, only to break her heart and destroy her life.

Unlike her character, whose desperation to hold onto the past she describes as a tragedy, Juliette insisted she lives for now.

The 51-year-old Oscar-winning actress said: “In acting, you have to be so present, you’re using the memories in order to create something new.

Juliette Binoche in Clouds of Sils Maria (Carole Bethuel/CG Cinema)
Juliette Binoche in Clouds Of Sils Maria (Carole Bethuel/CG Cinema)

“It’s true that I don’t think too much of the past. It’s me, Juliette, I’m like that, I’m a very present lover.”

But despite not relating to her character in that sense, Juliette admitted she relished the chance to play an actress, however tortured.

“When you’re an actor and you have to talk about acting, it’s fantastic, because it’s your field. It’s the water you’re bathing in,” she said.

“And I was happy to be able to show what an actor’s going through sometimes in their personal life. It costs something to play something.”

And she understood some of the paranoia her character goes through in the film.

Juliette is currently starring in a new production of Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Antigone, which has already been on in London and is currently touring Europe before heading to New York. Playing such a tortured soul, night after night, takes it toll, she admitted.

She confessed: “The night of the premiere, I said, ‘What am doing here? Why am I going through his hell?!’ Because you think, ‘Those critics’. You’re the target, and they have rifles coming onto you. That’s the paranoia of the actor. But somehow, you’ve got to put your mind and your spirit in another place.”

Clouds Of Sils Maria is in cinemas now.