Vincent Cassel’s Drive to Be “Enemy #1″

The French star of "Mesrine" talks about cinema that gets under your skin, working with wife Monica Bellucci, and the pressures of having a famous father.

Did you have to do a lot of research for this part?

I’m not a good student. And I don’t want to be. I don’t like to do a lot of research. But at the same time I had so much time to prepare for this part that I did wind up reading everything that had been published about him. I met the women who shared his life, his accomplices, the cops who chased him, people he knew when he was a kid, journalists who interviewed him. We did a lot of research. The good thing about having so much time is that you can do some research, then do something else – you can mature the idea. By the time we started, all I had to do was gain some weight and then start to shoot.

Let’s talk about that. You strike me as a very physical actor — one always remembers the way your characters move.

That’s because I’m a dancer. Not anymore, really, but that’s what I trained in at first. My first experience was at a circus school and ballet dancing. My father was a dancer too, and he taught me about the quality of movement. And I did some martial arts — never about fighting, I was just attracted to the beauty of the movement. I still am, even though I don’t dance anymore. And I really do research the way my characters move. Most of the time I don’t walk the same way, I hold my cup or my cigarette differently. I take a lot of pleasure doing this.

How did gaining all that weight for Mesrine’s older scenes affect that?

Part of the work is done, really. Once you gain all that weight, you don’t have to “act” as much. You are. You walk differently. You breathe differently. The first dailies I saw, that was something that really struck me, and I hadn’t thought of it before — the breathing. To me, it says that he’s going to die, really. To get caught in these sorts of things that you didn’t think of initially is very interesting, because it takes over you.

I imagine it was also a challenge, because you’re telling a whole life story, and he probably moved differently at different times of his life.

Totally. I thought many times about “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” You never really know who Gary Oldman is in that film. And that’s a problem, I think. I didn’t know Gary Oldman at the time I saw the movie — and after the movie, I still didn’t know. And even though I think the movie is very beautiful and super-interesting on thousands of levels, that, from my point of view, was wrong. Because you were losing the character, the main character.

And that was important to me on this film: I wanted to make sure we never lost the guy. And I thought, if I’m too good at disguising myself, we’re going to lose him. There were a lot of different transformations we had to deal with — there was the time in his life, and there was what he was doing to hide, his disguises. So we had to have a few things that we’d never lose.

Such as?

The voice. He had a lisp, for example. I used that, although I couldn’t do it to the extent that he had it, because it would have been too much over five hours. And I had things in my mouth — the guy who did the makeup actually suggested I take them out for the earlier scenes, because it would make me look thinner and more youthful, and I said, no, because I felt it was important that the shape of the face remains the same.

I want to ask about the films you’ve done with your wife, Monica Bellucci. You two seem to have managed to actually have real chemistry onscreen, which for some reason is very rare for married couples who act together.

The truth is that I really love working with her, for a very practical reason — I can see her more. We have another project coming up. We’re going to shoot a romantic comedy in Rio, during the Carnival. A pretty sexy one. It will be fun. It will be about being a couple and working in this industry.

You’ve forged a different career from your father, who was a very famous actor in France.

I forced a different career from my father. It was a totally conscious decision on my part. I was sure that I would never work in France, and that I would be doing my career in America. I was fascinated by Coppola, by Scorsese, by Spike Lee, by New York. I dreamed about being a bike messenger in New York. And I did that. I came to New York, and when I was 17, that was the first job I had here. I did everything: I was a busboy, I did deliveries. I loved it. Because it was part of my training.

Did anybody know who you were?

Nobody knew who I was. I was a teenager and I was here, like everybody else. But after a while, I realized that I was French. I was Parisian. I was feeling homesick. So I went back to France, and that was when I met the directors that I worked with over there. Mathieu [Kassovitz], Gaspar [Noé], Christophe Gans, Jan Kounen — they were all like me. They couldn’t relate with what was going on in the French industry. We wanted to break everything and start from scratch. And we did, with the kinds of movies we made.

My father never really understood where this was coming from. When he saw “Irreversible,” he just didn’t get it. And I told him, “You don’t understand, but you will.” The good thing about all this was that people didn’t understand who I was. Was I the young thug from “Dobermann,” or was I the romantic guy from “L’Appartement”? Was I a glamorous, good-looking gentleman, or a rude skinhead? And that gave me freedom. I tried to keep it like that for as long as I could. Now, of course, they all know who I am, but those years were great, because people were confused.

It sounds not unlike your character in “Mesrine” — he too had to escape from the path his father had laid out for him.

There is always something in common. That was one of the things about Mesrine: He didn’t have to be a thief, but he had to do something different. One of the interesting things I learned while we were preparing this — the generation after the Second World War, they saw the previous generation as losers. So they went to the Algerian War, and they were willing to go. They felt they had to wash the shame of their fathers. And they were much more willing to fight.

“Mesrine: Killer Instinct” opens in limited release on August 27th, followed by the release of “Mesrine: Public Enemy #1″ on September 3rd.

[Additional photos: "Irreversible," Lionsgate, 2002, "Mesrine: Public Enemy #1," Music Box Films, 2010]

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