It's hard to believe that Juliette Binoche, a vivid, quicksilver presence, ever felt like simply giving up.

There's a directness and intensity about her: she's a force-field of energy, eye contact, responsiveness. Yet, she says, she recently emerged from a time when she simply didn't want to work: "My desire had left me."

This hadn't happened to her before and it was difficult to deal with.

"Yeah, yeah, I was worried," she says. "It wasn't a pleasant moment." But it's behind her now. So what brought her back?

"Well, I wonder," she says simply and shrugs, but doesn't linger on the thought. "It's necessary . . . you need the cycles. It's a back-and-forth thing: you've got to leave in order to come back. You can come back in a stronger way, or a different way, or" she says, giving a quick, throaty laugh "a worse way. Who knows? But at least you've felt something.

"It's like in love. It's the same thing. You've got to go away in order to come back, or you suffocate."

In fact - and it makes sense, somehow, that she dealt with not wanting to work by working - she kept making movies. During this time she appeared in a short film and in Austrian director Michael Haneke's Cache (in English, Hidden), to be released in Australia next week. Binoche, who speaks perfect English, has built a strong career in two languages.

She has made big-budget and independent films in French, with the likes of Krzysztof Kieslowski, Andre Techine, Leos Carax, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Rappeneau. Her English-speaking roles include The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Damage, The English Patient (she won an Oscar for best supporting actress), Bee Season and Mary, which premiered in Venice last year, where she plays an actor who becomes obsessed with her role as Mary Magdalene.

Hidden is her second movie with Haneke: she had originally contacted him, asking if he had a project for her. What came out of this was Code Unknown (2000), a film of interlocking stories and virtuoso long takes, a story of urban encounters and political and emotional complexities.