lunablue的夢想空間

Vincent Cassel: 'You don't have to be your character in real life'

這是Vincent最近一系列為了Black Swan影片而受訪的近期報導大標題

很喜歡這句話

是說 文森如果不這樣講 他演的角色可多的是千奇百怪的邪門角色

法國版的人民公敵上下集 的男主角Jacques Mesrine 被他演活了
Mesrine: Part 2 - Public Enemy #1
Mesrine: Part 1 - Killer Instinct

lunablue總算有機會看完了

他真的 ....得到法國凱撒獎男主角獎是應該的


He made his name playing hoodlums and rapists, and won acclaim as Mesrine, France's most charismatic gangster. Now his latest film, Black Swan, is about ballet. Is Vincent Cassel mellowing?

以下是guardian.co.uk 中的The Observer版上的報導(2010/12/12)

* Elizabeth Day

It isn't a good idea to upset Vincent Cassel. This, after all, is an actor who has made his name playing a succession of complex and profoundly villainous characters. In La Haine, Cassel's breakthrough 1995 film, he was a teenage hoodlum intent on killing a policeman. In Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg's violent 2007 deconstruction of the Russian underworld in London, Cassel's character rapes a 14-year-old girl and forces her into prostitution. And in Mesrine, arguably his most acclaimed role to date, the actor portrayed one of the most notorious gangsters in French history, winning a best actor César last year for his performance.

So I am a smidgen apprehensive that an ill-judged question will send him into some sort of psychopathic meltdown. At first, he does little to dispel this notion. "I do think villains are more interesting," he says, in faintly accented English. "Most of the time, they're more fun to play. They're far more true to life than really good people. I don't see all these really good people in real life. People are much more complex. The good guys are always more boring."

But in fact, at the age of 44, Cassel claims he is finally beginning to mellow. His most recent film, Adrift, was a beautifully shot low-budget Brazilian production, which had at its core a fractious yet deeply loving relationship between a father and his daughter. Cassel played the father with understated ease, displaying a hitherto unexplored softer side and a remarkable facility for languages (Cassel speaks Brazilian Portuguese throughout; he is also fluent in Russian and English).

"It felt like something different to be a part of this type of movie, in terms of character," Cassel admits.

He has recently become a father for the second time with his wife, the Italian actor Monica Bellucci – Léonie was born in May this year and the couple's elder daughter, Deva, is now six. "When you have kids, you realise how vulnerable you can be and perhaps that informs your acting. I'm a little bit more conscious of what it all means nowadays."

How does it feel living in a house full of females? Cassel laughs. "Well, that was always the plan."

As if any further proof were needed of Cassel's metamorphosis from on-screen villain to metrosexual new man, his next film is set in the world of ballet. In Darren Aronofsky's highly anticipated thriller, Black Swan (released on 21 January), Cassel appears alongside Natalie Portman and Winona Ryder as the controlling artistic director of a ballet company who creates a menacing rivalry between his leading dancers while casting a production of Swan Lake.

Cassel actually trained as a ballet dancer in his 30s "as a complement to what I was doing. I had this idea that actors should be able to do everything and I used ballet as a base for doing circus performance, tap dance, jazz, kung fu…" He trails off. He says he enjoyed filming Black Swan because it gave him the opportunity "to go back into that world where I was surrounded by dancers every day for a very long time. It's a terrible job. It's so hard. You have to get totally involved. Most of the dancers I met, there was nothing else they could see themselves doing. It was a vocation, like being a priest." Did he get blisters? "Yes and not only on my feet. Also on my hips, my lower back, my neck."

Cassel's roles are often defined by this same physicality: in Mesrine, he drank two 1,500-calorie milkshakes a day, eventually gaining three stone in an effort to bulk up his slender 6ft 2in physique. And although he is possessed of rugged good looks – cheekbones that look as though they have been hewn from granite; a nose as straight and sloping as a Pythagorean hypotenuse – he can alter his face to such an extent as to be virtually unrecognisable (in the 2001 French thriller Read My Lips, he wore a ferrety moustache and a false nose stuffed with lavatory paper).

His capacity for transformation extends even to his vocal cords – he has dubbed Hugh Grant's voice in French versions of the English actor's films. "The first movie I did of his was Four Weddings and a Funeral and I remember I was sick that day, I had a cold. Not so long ago, it was on French TV and it was terrible because all I could hear was the cold."

But for Cassel, acting has always been a craft where words are less important than the actions and images that accompany them. "It really doesn't matter what you're saying, it's what you're feeling. It's more like noise: the music you come up with when you let your emotions flow."

Did he learn this from watching his father, Jean-Pierre Cassel, a French actor who found fame as a light comedian before working with New Wave directors including Claude Chabrol and Luis Buñuel? "No," says Cassel firmly. "I don't think I act the same way as he did but I look like him. My voice is similar to his. There are a lot of things now when I watch his movies that I can see come from him in terms of genetics. We had two different ways of looking at things, he was of a different generation."

Unsurprisingly, Cassel was a rebellious teenager – his parents (his mother, Sabine Litique, was a journalist) divorced when he was 13 and he spent much of his adolescence being shunted from one French boarding school to the next. He got expelled from one liberal institution at the age of 16 and persuaded his father to send him to a circus academy, eventually finding work as a street performer and then as an actor.

His brother, Mathias Crochon, became a rapper and founded the group Assassin. Was Cassel ever tempted to follow in his sibling's footsteps? "No. I mean, I always loved rap music. I freaked out when I listened to Schoolly D and all that 80s hip-hop. I had all the clothes – the sneakers, the laces, the Kangol caps – but when you're a rapper, you have to be that persona all the time. The good thing about being an actor is that you don't have to be your characters in real life."

Which is probably just as well for the long-term security of his marriage to Bellucci. The couple have acted in several movies together, including Gaspar Noé's infamous 2002 film Irreversible, which featured a harrowing nine-minute rape scene in which Cassel spat in his wife's face.

Do they have arguments when they work together? "Yes, of course, because when you're really close, that's when you allow yourself to say what you think. If it's the person you share your life with, you don't have to be polite: you can go further, faster."

He says he admires his wife deeply, that she reminds him of those classic Italian movie actresses in teetering heels and kohl-lined eyes. "She's a very strong woman but she has a sensuality she never tries to hide. She can use her femininity without being vulgar. I think Monica has that combination of the Madonna and the whore." Does Bellucci admire him as an actor? He laughs. "You'll have to ask her. But she keeps making movies with me, so I suppose so."

The couple split their time between homes in London and Paris. In France, they are a celebrity couple, akin to a more glamorous European version of Posh and Becks. Cassel feels most at home in his native city, although he acknowledges that the French are undergoing a sociopolitical tussle to define their national identity. "France is different from what it used to be and people don't want to accept it. It's an identity crisis."

Does he agree with President Sarkozy's recent ban on wearing the burqa in public? "Yes. It's not healthy if people are allowed to circulate with hidden faces, for whatever reason. If I wear a helmet because I'm driving my scooter, someone in a public place is going to ask me to take it off."

What kind of scooter does he ride? "A Piaggio MP3. It has three wheels, it's much more stable." A reliable, three-wheeled vehicle? Cassel is beginning to sound rather middle-aged. I ask him what colour it is. "Black," he says. Given Vincent Cassel's newly mellow persona as a happily married father of two with a penchant for ballet, this might now be the darkest thing about him.