Vincent Cassel is being charming. Thousands of kilometres away, on a dial-in merry-go-round of media interviews, he takes the time to enquire about the current hour in Australia (it’s not that late). Whether it’s the actor’s inherent manners or his Gallic genes, it’s a rarity on the invariably rushed celebrity interview circuit.
Yet for all his charm, Cassel is best known for playing the considerably-less-than charming, like his character in his latest film Partisan. Gregori lures abandoned women and their young children into his compound to become part of his cult-like “family”. He feeds them, protects them, sleeps with them and trains their children to become assassins.
When one of the newest young recruits openly disagrees with Gregori, he is harshly disciplined. Alexander, at 11 the oldest and most beloved of his prodigies, witnesses this defiance – and its outcome – and begins to question Gregori’s authority, with devastating consequences.
The film is set in an unspecified eastern bloc country at an unspecified dystopian time and it is deeply disturbing. Cassel, however, says he can understand his character. He sees Gregori as sincere, even as he transfers his own distorted worldviews onto impressionable minds. “He wants to save those kids. He doesn’t want to be alone – he created that family. When he is teaching those kids how to kill people, he really believes that’s the only way to survive in the world.”
Partly shot in an unrecognisable regional Victoria, the film was directed by Melbourne-born Ariel Kleiman who co-wrote the screenplay with longtime collaborator Sarah Cyngler. Now London-based, the pair have been on the rise since their Sundance award-winning shorts, Deeper than Yesterday and Young Love.
Cassel knew of the pair’s work but he initially turned them down when he was approached about Partisan. The required six weeks of filming in Australia was too long a commitment. He didn’t expect Kleiman to offer to halve the time. “At that time I was stuck and I just had to do it,” the actor says with a laugh. Another lure was the opportunity to catch a few waves along the Victorian coast. “They said: ‘You can’t, the insurance!’ I was like, ‘If I can’t surf, I won’t come.’ They found a way.”
Known for his work with big-name directors in Black Swan, Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen and A Dangerous Method, Cassel says he enjoys working with filmmakers like Kleiman on their early films. He worked with directors Mathieu Kassovitz on La Haine, Gilles Mimouni on L’Appartement, Gaspar Noé on Irréversible and Jez Butterworth on Birthday Girl. Although emerging filmmakers often make “beautiful errors” they have an unmistakeable energy, he says. “I like to work with people that may not be that professional at the beginning but who have this burning desire to speak and to say what they feel like.”
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, Kassovitz recently said it was time to make a sequel to his groundbreaking film La Haine. While Cassel’s character Vinz won’t return, the actor says a follow-up could be a good idea, particularly for the director. “When Mathieu decided to do La Haine, it was because he was shocked by the assassination of a kid in a police station. Suddenly he felt like he had something to say about it. Maybe with everything that has happened lately, that might happen to him again. It feels like for the last few years, he was a bit empty and he didn’t know what story to tell. Maybe that would be the next great movie of Mathieu Kassovitz.”
Cassel remains proud of the film, which is 20 years old this year, and he’s often greeted by fans in T-shirts bearing his face or repeating its famous lines back at him. It had an enduring impact in France, where it represented the disenfranchised suburban youth on screen for what felt like the first time. The actor says the industry was so disconnected at that point that distributors considered including subtitles for the French audiences. “They felt like the way we were talking in the movie wouldn’t have been understandable for the audience. Of course they were totally wrong.”
For most of his own childhood, Cassel attended boarding school. It was an experience he loathed. He often ran away and was frequently excluded. “I couldn’t understand why parents would put their kids in a place where they don’t see them. I remember saying one day to my parents: ‘Do you realise those people might know me better than you do?’ ”
He remembers questioning the teachers’ authority at that age, just as Alexander, the 11-year-old in Partisan, does. His own healthy sense of disrespect was innate, nodding to his brother French MC Rockin’ Squat from the hip-hop group Assassin. “He does the rap version of what I do in movies. I don’t know where it comes from but we definitely questioned authority,” he says, before adding: “Still at the end at the day, I’m a bourgeois actor, I’m not on the field putting bombs so I guess I don’t question it that much.”
- Partisan is released in Australian cinemas on 28 May
