Derailed - Vincent Cassel interview
Interview by Rob Carnevale
Q. How easy is it for you to play such a cold-blooded bad guy and give him some charisma?
A. Very easy actually. I just had fun doing it. The badder the guy is, the more fun you can have and it shows on the screen.
Q. Are you up on the hip-hop scene, given some of the movie’s co-stars?
A. I grew up on their music, both of them – Xzibit and the Wu-Tang Clan (for RZA). I got rappers in my family; my brother is a rapper in France. His name is Squat. I was happy to work with them and, in fact, I was even more impressed by Xzibit than I was with Jennifer [Aniston].
Q. How did you feel about joining the growing legion of French villains in Hollywood?
A. It looks like there was a lack of British villains, so now they’re turning to the French! But I don’t mind playing the villain. It depends on what kind of villain it is, or if there is something interesting. But for the two villains I did in a row, I also said no to about 25. I think I’ll stop a little bit now.
Q. The rape scene in Derailed brought back memories of watching the rape scene in Irreversible. How did it feel to be playing a rapist, at first glance, who causes as much harm to Clive Owen’s character and Jennifer Aniston’s character as the rapist in Irreversible?
A. Well honestly, the rape scene is hard to watch but you don’t see much and when you think about it, it’s not a rape scene. It’s a couple having fun in front of someone else.
Q. Only afterwards though…
A. Yes but that’s the way we did it. I wasn’t raping Jennifer Aniston’s character. We were having a sex game in front of Clive Owen [laughs]. There was nothing dark or anything like that on set.
Q. You’ve indicated that you may take a break from villains. So what sort of things are you doing next?
A. Well actually I will change this kind of stuff but for the moment I have just played the devil! It’s a movie called Sheitan, which means the devil in Arabic. It’s from a young French director, named Kim Chapiron, who is 24-years-old. And then we’re going to do two movies in a row about the life of Jacques Mesrine, who was the public enemy No.1 in France during the ‘70s. A crazy man with an interesting life.
Q. How is your devil depicted because in more recent films like Constantine, he has been dressed by Gucci…
A. This one is a peasant who lives in a little village. He is having a baby with his sister and I am playing the sister too.