Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper.
Al Pacino in The Godfather. Like them, Vincent Cassel’s acting career
exploded like a gunshot. La Haine (1995), Mathieu Kassovitz’s
incendiary portrait of disaffected youth in the Paris suburbs, remains
Cassel’s best-known role. He played the Jewish skinhead Vinz: volatile,
unpredictable and armed. A storm of angular cheekbones and aggression, it
was a star-making turn in one of the most iconic movies of the 1990s.
A combination of impressive lineage — he’s the son of the actor Jean-Pierre
Cassel, who played screen lovers to Brigitte Bardot Jean Seberg and
Catherine Deneuve — and a great instinct ensured that in a few years in the
mid-Nineties he graduated from playing hot-headed street punks to being the
first choice for practically any role available. He became the actor of
choice for the outlaws of French cinema — directors such as Kassovitz, Jan
Kounen and Gaspar Noé. He was a down-at-heel ex-con in Read My Lips
; a flamboyantly foolish French aristocrat in Elizabeth and the
romantic lead in the hugely successful L’Appartement , the film
on which he met his future wife, the Italian actress Monica Bellucci. Though
not always the most uncomplicated of relationships — the pair were rumoured
to be on the verge of splitting in 2002, but then had a daughter together in
2004 — Cassel and Bellucci as a couple have old-school allure.
But while they may be European cinema’s most glamorous marrieds — and
certainly the most photogenic — they also share a taste for challenging
movies. In order to spend time together, they often try to work on the same
films. They appeared as lovers in the controversial rape revenge drama Irrevérsible
. Less traumatic work includes The Brotherhood of the Wolf, Doberman
and most recently, a cameo for Bellucci as a vampire in a film within
Cassel’s latest film, Sheitan .
Disarmingly candid and dangerously charismatic in person, Cassel, now 40,
recalls a little ruefully: “At the time when we were doing La Haine
and Dobermann and all of those movies, I really thought that there
would be a new generation coming in and that we would change everything. But
finally it was not exactly like that.”
But even as the young rebels of French cinema grew older and, in some cases,
more mainstream, fresh talent was maturing, inspired by those Cassel films.
About ten years ago, at the height of his early fame, Cassel was accosted by
a skinny teenager with a video camera and bags of attitude. It was his first
meeting with Kim Chapiron, who is now 24 and the director of Sheitan
, which Cassel both stars in and produced. “He just jumped on me and said:
‘Can yousay something for Kourtrajmé?’ I asked what is this Kourtrajmé? And
I just did a fake interview.”
A few months later, Cassel received a CD-Rom containing a chaotic video
scrapbook. Included was the footage of Cassel riffing for the camera. “When
I saw that, I thought those guys were going to do something.”
Kourtrajmé, it turns out, is “backwards slang” for courts-métrages
, meaning shortfilms. It’s a collective founded by Chapiron with fellow
directors Romain Gavras (son of the Greek-born director Costa-Gavras) and
Toumani Sangaré with the simple aim of making video shorts with the
facilities, skills and talent available to them at any particular time.
Kourtrajmé is driven by a prolific creativeimperative and the self-promotion
instinct of a street crew rather than any particular financial ambitions.
They bring to their film-making the same attitude as graffiti artists bring
to tagging. Cassel says appreciatively: “They are of that generation that
says: ‘I’ve got a camera and a computer, I don’t need any money to do what I
want to do.’ They just shoot, edit, shoot, edit. Then they give it away in
the street for free.”
Chapiron, talking on the phone from Paris, cites Kassovitz and Cassel as the
reason he decided to be a director. “My family lived downstairs from Mathieu
Kassovitz so as a child I remember going to the premiere of his first film, Métisse
. Before that I wanted to be an illustrator, but afterwards I knew I was
going to be a director.”
Cassel’s next encounter with Chapiron came a few years later. “He called me
and asked if I could do a short movie,” Cassel says. “I said I’m shooting a
film, I just have two hours free this Sunday. He said no problem. He wasn’t
able to tell me the story so I just went with the flow. At the end I was
just in my underwear in front of 15 young Vietnamese guys dressed as Chinese
mafia.”
More valuable than an afternoon clowning in his pants for a teenager’s short
film is the fact that Cassel became a tireless champion of the Kourtrajmé
movement. It’s hard to imagine another actor of his stature dedicating so
much time and energy to a group of young punks armed with video cameras,
turntables and spray cans.
“I was talking about them to everyone, all the producers: ‘These young guys
are really good. You should do something with them.’ And they’re like: ‘Yeah
but it’s shot on video, we don’t understand.’ So one day I just decided to
produce them myself.”
The business sense behind a sprawling, multidisciplinary entity such as
Kourtrajmé didn’t escape him. “It’s like an industry — there are 134 people.
You have musicians, you have actors, singers, graffiti artists, internet
designers. So everything is free really.”
Chapiron is full of praise for Cassel, describing him as the “Godfather” of
Kourtra-jmé. But Cassel is having none of it. He is not, he says,doing this
to be nice. “I’m not the Mother Teresa of short-movie makers. It’s because I
think it’s really refreshing and that they’re really good.”
There’s also the fact that he feels that Chapiron and his crew are in some
ways the natural heirs to the rebel directors who launched his own career
and can inspire him in a way that his original collaborators no longer can.
“Directing is such hard work and a long process so in a way you change. So I
do find in Kourtrajmé something that I once really liked and that I might
not find any more with other directors.”
Cassel describes Sheitan ,his first feature-length project with the
collective, ashis first comedy. “People who don’t think it’s funny cannot
appreciate the movie. It’s not scary enough to be a pure horror movie.” But
it is, he concedes, “a bit disgusting”.
In fact, Sheitan (Arabic for Satan) has no shortage ofchills,
particularly in the final 20 minutes or so. But the real fun is in its
macabre weirdness. At first it looks like a French take on hillbilly horror
— it references The Hills Have Eyes, among others. But there is
also a flavour of Larry Clark in the candid snapshots of disaffected urban
youth.
Three boys are broke on the day before Christmas Eve. They’re thrown out of a
nightclub, thanks to the bad behaviour of Bart (Olivier Bartélémy), and,
with nothing better to do, accept an invitation from minxy chick Eve (Roxane
Mesquida) to continue the party at her place in the country.
There they meet Cassel’s housekeeper Joseph, a truly hilarious creation.
Joseph has teeth you could use in a dry stone wall and a laugh that sounds
like somebody jump-starting a tractor. He has a bow-legged stance and
trousers held up with twine. He takes an immediate and leering interest in
Bart. It’s no exaggeration to say that Cassel’s demented performance makes
the movie. But it’s a role with which he had real problems.
“I was really bad. My feeling on the first day was that Iwas producing the
movie that was going to end my career.”
Fortunately his career is intact — Cassel is talking on the set of his latest
film, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises . For his role as a
shady character from the Russian underworld, he’s wearing facial scars, a
lean, dark suit and hair that looks like it was borrowed from a small-time
Ukrainian drug dealer.
It’s not the first time that Cassel has been cast as a Russian. “When you
start to do American movies, if you are not an English-speaking person you
will always be cast as a French baddie or a Russian or whatever,” he says.
“That’s the way it is. From an English-speaking point of view, an accent is
an accent.”
Isn’t it a little depressing to be one of the most celebrated actors of a
generation in France, but to be relegated to playing generic villains in the
US? “No, it’s just the way it is. The truth is I don’t mind that much being
cast as a baddie because I enjoy it.
“Even so, I am always trying to make my baddies a little different, a little
more subtle. Hopefully in time I will play a hero. But look, even when I
produced the movie myself, I still end up playing the bad guy.”
Sheitan is released on February 23
