Mesrine...

France's most wanted

Since his electric breakthrough appearance in La Haine, Vincent Cassel has established a distinct brand of cool - and become half of cinema's most glamorous couple by marrying Monica Bellucci. Now he is set to become a true international star. Interview by Jason Solomons

• 
• • Jason Solomons
  • The Observer, Sunday 22 March 2009
  • Article history

Vincent Cassel: incendiary screen presence. Photograph: Matt Carr/Getty Images

There's a scene in the new French blockbuster Mesrine where an ageing underworld godfather sizes up a lithe new gangster in town. The weary old-timer is played by Gérard Depardieu, for three decades the world's most famous French actor; the newcomer is played by live wire Vincent Cassel, the actor who epitomised snarling Parisian inner-city angst in 1995's La Haine. As these two alpha males bristle at each other, it feels like a hand-over moment, one charged with significance - not just for this film but for the history of French cinema.

With the epic, two-part gangster tale Mesrine, Cassel will take up his long-promised position as France's most famous, most bankable male star. Jacques Mesrine was one of France's best-known criminals, a violent robber, arms dealer and kidnapper who nevertheless achieved folk-hero status for evading police throughout the 1960s and 70s.

It's a gift of a part for an actor, the chance to play a charismatic, unstable, charming psychotic, a philanderer and a family man, whom the police called "The Man with 1,000 Faces" - and Cassel carries it off with aplomb. The film was released in two separate instalments - L'Instinct de mort and L'Ennemi public no 1 - in France last year, becoming a hit at the box office and earning its star his first César for best actor.

Cassel was visibly moved by his win, shedding tears on the podium. "I feel happy, light as air, overjoyed and exhausted," he said.

As significant as the former bad boy's acceptance by the French acting establishment, a win for Mesrine's director Jean-François Richet can also be viewed as era-defining. Richet had previously been seen as a director of flashy, youth-oriented movies. But the two Mesrine films boast a cast of French stars that have become familiar to international audiences. Cassel, whom American critics have called "the French Robert Mitchum", leads a line-up that includes veterans such as Depardieu and Gérard Lanvin, as well as Mathieu Amalric, fresh from his appearance as a Bond villain, Cécile de France and Ludivine Sagnier, both of whom had had Hollywood experience.

"Yes, this is a new generation of French actors and directors but it's harder to group us all together," says Cassel of the cast. "The only thing that typifies us is our diversity. That's what keeps our cinema alive, thank God."

What you get from Cassel, as soon as you meet him, is a sense of restlessness. He is wiry and angular, bristling with a contagious energy, and never really settles in any of the several chairs he takes up during our Saturday afternoon in the louchely cool Cafe Chic, on the Faubourg St Honoré. He devours a cheeseburger and picks up the frites with his fingers. He charms the waitress and poses with some visiting and very attractive Russian blondes who've come up the stairs to our private table and stared at us, giggling, until he has to "do his duty".

Our conversation takes in football, the Oscars, George Clooney and Brad Pitt, British cinema of the early 80s, how to make fresh pasta, Adidas trainers and the fate of hip-hop. He says his wife, Monica Bellucci, dropped him off and would have come in for a glass of wine but has instead gone shopping with their four-year-old daughter, Deva. Shame. He's having a rare few weeks off, at home, with his wife and child. Mesrine took over his life for two years, earning him a record for the number of shooting days for any actor in the history of French film production.

"It was set in the 1970s, so there are a lot of moustaches and wigs and beards," he laughs. Isn't that what acting's all about, in essence, I ask, putting on masks? "I've always loved the idea of changing myself, wearing costumes and disguises. It takes you back to being a kid, to dressing up. This was certainly the hardest performance of my life and the biggest film of my career. You could say that maybe I grew up as we went along."

Agnès Poirier, a French critic based in England, believes the César will propel Cassel to great things. "There is no more glamorous a couple in cinema than Vincent and Monica Bellucci, and he has been a sex symbol for many years, in a scruffy kind of Jean-Paul Belmondo sort of a way," she remarks. "He's now proving a genuine leading man, not a boy any more, and this can now be the springboard to a very successful international career. He has been breaking through for a while now, but I think the César will give him the confidence to become a huge star in his own mind, and that is vital."

Perhaps the hardest aspect of Mesrine is the character himself, an essentially unlikable man, or, as Cassel describes him, "a clown, a very dangerous clown ... He's a man who behaved differently each time a moment came along - be it as a father, or a lover, or a murdering bank robber. So I approached it as a character study - he's likable, touching, scary, crazed, all of those things."

Cassel, born in Montmartre, Paris, 42 years ago, burst onto the film scene as a snarling young boxer in La Haine, in 1995. Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, it was a moody, black and white piece about an inner-city riot, revealing to an international audience the tensions and racial pressures of modern France. It still looks brilliant today and, unfortunately, is still just as relevant, given the 2006 riots in the north of Paris.

"I love that La Haine is still so accurate, but that also horrifies me," says Cassel. "I don't think France is a racist country, I really don't, but we do still have many problems with our immigrant past, and there's a shame that goes with that, that works both ways, in the host and in the post-immigrant generation.

"Whatever the politics, it was a landmark for me - I was actually 28 by then, but it was the start of everything. It seemed a new start for French film, all that energy. We all needed it and it felt like a gust of freedom. I'd never dreamed I could even find a part like that in French film. I was thinking of going to London drama schools or to New York, because France didn't accommodate the things I wanted to do in film. But in La Haine, with Kassovitz, a group of us found that we weren't alone, that there were filmmakers who felt the same way."

La Haine brought Parisian slang, racial insults, police brutality, turntable scratching, drugs and an urban coolness to French cinema that had been lacking since the heyday of the nouvelle vague, when Jean-Paul Belmondo became the poster boy for European insouciance in A Bout de souffle.

"It was so new that we were unsure how to actually speak," recalls Vincent. "Nobody had ever spoken like that on screen, you know, in the language of the streets, or the 'hood, and we were worried we'd have to subtitle it if French audiences were going to understand it."

Cassel has, at times, appeared to be the only French actor resisting middle age. His energies have been expended on cultish works, comic book adaptations such as the cartoonishly violent Dobermann, the frenzied Sheitan or fantasy fight films such as Brotherhood of the Wolf. He has founded his own production company and dedicated himself to discovering new talent on the Paris streets among rappers and skateboarders and short-film-makers.

"I'm trying to keep some of that original ferocity, but I often feel alone in doing it and that I can't do it myself any more, so I need to encourage others to do it," he says. "And now I have a big house, nice clothes and I travel in first class and I love it, so maybe it's time to enjoy being a star."

Cassel has always had an incendiary screen presence, even if he hasn't always made the best use of it. He was superb, for instance, in the brilliant Jacques Audiard thriller Read My Lips and made international inroads before being the voice of Monsieur Hood in the Shrek cartoon and starring opposite Nicole Kidman in the unsuccessful FilmFour British comedy Birthday Girl (2001).

He followed La Haine with another swift hit in the form of L'Appartement, showing a yuppie flip side to the angst of suburban Paris. Gilles Mimouni's slick thriller won the 1998 Bafta for best foreign language film and allowed Cassel to showcase his YSL-suited charm after the tracksuited violence of La Haine. "I loved the transition," he remembers. "I literally had a few weeks to grow my hair back after La Haine and then suddenly I was playing sexy, romantic, almost passive."

L'Appartement is also where he met Monica Bellucci. The Italian actress was making her film debut outside Italy and he fell in love with her almost at once. "I hope it's not too arrogant to say that with Monica, many people do," he says. "Serge Gainsbourg used to say that a cinema set is far too erotic a place to leave one's wife alone, and I know this from having conducted my affair with Monica during filming. It is so strong, so intense, so I know I'll never fall in love with anyone again. It's also why I've now made nine films with her."

Together, Cassel and Bellucci are the golden couple of European cinema. I've seen them bring Cannes to a standstill just by walking from their hotel to a restaurant. The intense scrutiny in France and Italy has not been easy, but they appear happy now. Fame seems to sit easier with them.

The fuss might have something to do with Irréversible, the highly controversial film directed by Gaspar Noé that they made together in 2002, a film told backwards, featuring Bellucci in a vicious 10-minute rape scene, as well as the pair of them cavorting naked in a 15-minute love scene. The film's first screening at Cannes, when two people are said to have fainted, is still a high watermark in the festival's long life of controversial film moments.

"At the end of it all, I think Irréversible will always be seen as the biggest film of my career," says Vincent now. "When directors approach me to work with them, they talk about Irréversible. In trying to do something so different with that film, I almost made it hard for me to do anything normal."

It was Bellucci who convinced him to do the film. "When Gaspar Noé first asked me, at five in the morning in a nightclub, if I'd like to do a real sex scene with my wife, I told him to fuck off. But when I mentioned this creep to Monica, she said, 'Why not? Invite the guy to dinner.'"

Their love scene together, in which they play-fight and wander around their home, is surely one of the most beautiful and sexy love scenes in all cinema, just as the rape scene is one of the hardest I've ever had to watch. "Monica made me leave the set for that scene, so I went on holiday in the south of France. She was worried I might hit the actor who was raping her, that I couldn't watch it. It's obviously not a scene I like to re-watch very often, but Monica, she's very proud of that scene as a piece of film acting, and I think she is amazing."

Cassel has family history in show business. His father, Jean-Pierre, who died in 2007, was a French Fred Astaire, a tap dancer and light comedian who also worked with Claude Chabrol and Luis Buñuel, starring in the latter's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. "I remember being in London throughout 1977, when Dad was playing Zak in the original production of A Chorus Line at the Drury Lane theatre," reveals Vincent. "I must have seen it 50 times - I know the lyrics and the choreography by heart." He laughs at my surprised expression. "Ah, you thought that tough guys don't dance?" he says, clearly pleased with his grasp of English vernacular.

His physical movement and his English have been to his clear advantage, showcasing his capoeira skills in Ocean's Twelve, hanging out on Lake Como with Brad and George and the gang. He has also appeared in Derailed, opposite Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen, as well as the London-set thriller Eastern Promises, with Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts. "I think we're nearly there, where a French actor can make the jump to American films and English films," he says. "Marion Cottillard's Edith Piaf won the Oscar last year and now Slumdog Millionaire wins best film, so the barrier of language is coming down, slowly.

"But my home is Paris and I'm a total parisien, with all the good and bad that entails, so I can't see myself ever fully leaving." He picks up the bottle of a very decent Brouilly left over from our lunch. His ice-blue eyes dance and he shuffles in his seat again, raising the glass with a wicked smile. "And why would I want to?"

• Mesrine is released later in the year

Mesrine - L'instinct de mort - teaser

Mesrine: L'instinct De Mort - BA - HD