Vincent Cassel
The actor talks to Pure Movies about playing a public enemy.

Vincent Cassel’s latest film is a two-part biopic of the notorious French gangster, Jacques Merine. Mesrine: Killer Instinct, the first part, is released on 7 August and the second part, Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 is released on 28 August. It is directed by Jean-Francios Richet. The La Haine star speaks to Pure Movies writer Dan Hollis about playing a public enemy.

Vincent Cassel: So what would you like to know?

Did your opinion of Jacques Mesrine change over the course of making these films?

VC: Well first of all I’ve never been a fan of the character – as a criminal you never know why people are doing what they’re doing, so I’ve learnt a lot but still today I do not know quite what to think of him. For the audience, we’re not telling you exactly what to think about the guy; sometimes he’s really sympathetic, sometimes he’s just the worst jerk you can meet.

From the start of the film we get an idea of what made him the kind of a man he is from the terrible things that happen in the Algerian war…

VC: This excuse, to me, doesn’t work. I think it’s just a way for him to justify the way he was living. And the father figure thing, he used as an excuse; I don’t believe these are the reasons he became “Jacques Mesrine” the gangster, the killer. A lot of people went to that war. Another interesting thing that we didn’t tell in the film is that as a kid he loved to go to the movies, James Cagney especially, I think that’s one of the real justifications.

Is the general perception of the French public similar to yours?

VC: It depends, people at the time had a really strong judgement on him, they believed what they read in the paper. Of the six murders he was accused of by the French Justice (in his autobiography he wrote in prison he accuses himself of forty-three), but none of these crimes have been proven till now. But still, he was executed in the middle of Paris with his corpse displayed on TV. What I have learned is that this guy was getting too dangerous as a clown, he was too loud and you have to understand in ’79 when he got shot by the cops, he was the favourite celebrity of the French people, everybody was running after him and they couldn’t find him. But that same year he gave an interview to Paris Match insulting and threatening the government and I think that’s why he died, not because of the murders.

Did you meet any opposition, anyone not wanting you to make this film?

VC: No because that trial had been closed two years when filming started, the police were found not guilty – guilty of what? Guilty of executing him without due evidence. We thought we would have to change names, but we didn’t. I think even now, the police won’t mind the truth coming out about his execution, even of it’s not the official version.

Have you met anybody who knew him?

VC: Oh yeah, I was contacted for the movie seven years ago and it took a long time to get a good enough script, to find the right director, to raise the money more than anything else, and the good thing about having seven years is that I could read everything written by him, on him, and to meet the people who knew him – the ones who were still alive, the ones I could meet without paying a fortune, so I really collected a lot of information.

Were there any quite scary characters?

VC: Well they’re getting older now so they’re seventy-something now, they don’t want to go back to jail! Some of them, one in particular, is really crazy, but as we say, he is mean but not dangerous.

In the film, after breaking out of prison, he returns with a friend in a jeep and several machine guns and tries to bust his friends out, but he fails…

VC: Yeah exactly he fails! But he went back as he said he would, and that’s enough to tell you that the guy was totally a man of his word, and on that you have to respect the him. He got really angry when this extreme-right journalist wrote that he had no “word”, but that’s the one thing he has – that’s the only clean part of him: you can trust him when he says something.

Did you find you had to be careful not to make him too sympathetic?

VC: Well seven years ago, I felt that the original director was too much of a fan of Mesrine up to the point where he would say ‘and then the bad guys come in…’ – ‘who are the bad guys?’ –  ‘the cops’. I then knew we couldn’t make four hours of this sort of film, we needed a more complex character. They didn’t want to go that way so I had to drop the project. However, it was a bluff; perhaps somewhat pretentiously I thought that the movie would simply not be made without me, so I told them that when you’ve get the right script, call me back. In the final script, from one scene to the next, you didn’t know what to think of the character, so I agreed, also to make it into a two part film which I initially was against.

With the length of time you’ve invested in the project, does this make it the most important film of your career?

VC: I’ve actually got another project I’ve been working on for seven years, so perhaps not the most important at this point, but it is still definitely an important project for me.

Do you see him on one level as a mirror for French society – they project on him their views of the government, the police, themselves?

VC: Totally. I think that’s what Jean-Francois Richet, the director, is saying through this pretty normal guy – he is a showman, not a huge criminal [someone coughs] sorry, I’ve lost it! But, yes, it’s a political snapshot of France in the ’60s and ’70s, from the post-war of Algeria to that moment of boredom in the ’70s.

How involved where you in the casting of the film?

VC: Well I gave Richet seven names, and he didn’t listen to one of them! But you know what, it’s the best news; if a director becomes too easy to influence, maybe it’s not a director.

What are the main differences between the two parts of the film?

VC: I think they’re different in every way, meaning of course that the era is a different era; I mean the ’60s don’t look like the ’70s in terms of looks, music, cars. It’s a different political environment, too, but more than that, the first movie, the way that the narrative is told is very linear, it is very much a genre movie – film noir I would say – about a guy who’s trying to understand what he’s made of. At the end of the first movie, he knows what he is made of. The second movie is about an adult who knows exactly where he’s going but he’s really going for it, so you’re more into the psycho- and the ego-trip of the character.

Is Merine sexy or brutal in your mind?

VC: I think he’s both.

But he was attractive to women because of his public persona as a gangster, or because of who he really was as a man?

VC: I think some women, quite a few actually, are attracted to bad guys, even though they won’t go for it because it’s dangerous, the attraction still exists. Apart from the first woman he had in his life – a virgin in Spain totally outside of that world, the mother of his three kids – all the others he found in strip clubs and were, or had at some point been, prostitutes.

What happened to his three children and do you know what they think of the film?

VC: They’re still alive. I think they’re really proud of it, because I think it is the closest thing to the truth that has been made about their father in every sense, meaning that when he’s brave he’s brave and when he’s a jerk he’s a jerk.