Vincent Cassel: A devil in disguise

Vincent Cassel has established a reputation as the best French actor of his generation by playing swaggering rogue males: he exploded into international consciousness in 1995 playing the Jewish skinhead Vinz in La Haine; soon after that he was the charismatic criminal kingpin in Dobermann; and, in 2001, an ex-con in Read My Lips.

But when he tried his hand at playing a romantic lead in L'Appartement in 1996, such was his success that he ended up marrying his co-star, Monica Bellucci. They have gone on to share 11 screen credits and have a two-year-old daughter together. The most infamous of their joint undertakings is Irréversible, featuring a brutal nine-minute rape of Bellucci's character. Cassel plays her boyfriend and it's typical of the films he likes to make: edgy, rough and directed by a young cinematic outcast (in this case, Gaspar Noé).

Cassel has recently turned 40, and tells me how he's been taking on jobs and roles that in the past he would have run away from. "For the first time, I'm working with directors who are not of my generation. I just worked with Jean-Jacques Annaud [on Her Majestic Minor] who is 63, and at the moment I'm shooting Eastern Promises, a film by David Cronenberg, who is more or less the same age," says Cassel. "Normally I talk with really young directors; to do Sheitan after Irréversible, for me it is like I'm always trying to do a particular kind of movie. I don't always succeed, but that is what I've tried to do."

Because of the films that he made early on in his career, Cassel has always been seen as a champion of the French urban youth. It's a position that he is not only aware of, but exploits. "Kim [Chapiron, director of Sheitan], Romain [Gavras] and all those guys of their generation grew up watching La Haine and Dobermann, and I'm really very proud of this fact. These were the two movies of the time so I've ended up being the godfather to them, really."

As well as starring in Sheitan ("Satan" in Arabic), Cassel has taken on the role of producer. Its director, 26-year-old Chapiron, lived next door to director Mathieu Kassovitz and met Cassel on the set of La Haine. Cassel remembers: "He was 13, he popped into the room with a video camera and asked me to do a riff for the camera and he used that moment for a little short movie that he sent to me. It was great and I thought that what these guys are doing is the future of cinema - shooting things off the cuff and making them at home. I started to appear in the short films that he and his friends were doing until finally we did this feature."

Chapiron is a leading light in the film-making collective Kourtrajme, a project of which Cassel is immensely proud. "They are not trying to say something or represent any ideas," he says. "But just by being themselves they are already a statement about France and what it is becoming. There is something in the vibe. The fact that the group is so culturally mixed is a perfect representation about what France is going to be in the future. They all just live life together without caring that the other person comes from a different race or culture."

In contrast to the urban kids that he champions, Cassel was brought up in a middle-class area. His father was the actor Jean-Pierre Cassel, who was best known for his turns in the light-hearted comedies of Philippe de Broca in the 1950s. He then became a prominent actor in the Nouvelle Vague and has played opposite Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve. Cassel junior, however, has always tried to be his own man: "My father comes from the Nouvelle Vague, even though he wasn't very classical because he shot with Jean-Pierre Melville, Luis Buñuel and all those guys. On my way to create my own identity I thought that I couldn't work with any director associated with the Nouvelle Vague, directors like Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. I knew I really couldn't get into the French auteur-led tradition, plus I wasn't really interested because I grew up watching Raging Bull and The Godfather more than anything else."

Aged 18, Cassel moved to New York, believing that he couldn't have the acting career that he desired in France. It was while living in New York, he says, that he finally realised how French he actually was, and on his return to his native country he met directors such as Kassovitz and Noé, who shared his vision of edgy urban moviemaking. Recently, he realised that by going to New York in search of the New Hollywood cinema of the Seventies he was running towards what he had been trying to escape: "You look at those films, and reading Easy Riders, Raging Bulls [by Peter Biskind] you realise that they were all fans of Godard and the Nouvelle Vague."

He says that in an ideal world he would now make one French film and one international film a year. Doing just two would allow him both to spend more time with his daughter and to practise his latest hobby, surfing. He discovered his love of the latter last year when, burnt out, he took eight months off and went travelling around the world.

Running parallel to interest in his career has been interest in his marriage to Bellucci. Cassel says that the press intrusion has not been "that bad". Though the relationship has reportedly been rocky, there have been no rumours of break-ups since the birth of their child. From the way his eyes light up when he starts talking about his wife, saying that he loves her, their relationship - from the outside at least - seems strong. He also wants to make more films with her: "I guess it's better to work together with people that you like than not. Also it's a way to see each other more. We have a project that we're going to do together, but we're waiting to do it. The last one we did, Agents Secrets, was not released in England; we did the voiceover in Robots together; and maybe in around a year-and-a-half we're going to do another picture."

They were once approached to do a porn movie together by Noé. "But when we sat down to watch movies together and saw the sex scenes we thought it wasn't right. People would think it was a stunt. So at the last minute we pulled out of that and ending up doing Irréversible with Gasper instead."

The reason that the couple will have to wait a year-and-a-half is that Cassel is just about to start an eight-month shoot starring in two movies about the Seventies French gangster Jacques Mesrine - L'ennemi public No 1, and a follow-up, Death Instinct. Mesrine, like Cassel, is a hero to the disenfranchised youth of France: because of the way he bucked the system, he has become a symbol of freedom. Cassel says the films are about the deconstruction of a hero. The reputation of the loveable rogue of French cinema, however, seems set to remain intact.

'Sheitan' goes on general release on 23 February

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