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He has made his name playing edgy characters and bad guys, but French star Vincent Cassel took on the role of a lifetime with Mesrine: Killer Instinct, as he reveals to FOCUS.
Movies love a bad guy, the vicarious thrill of dark deeds committed by charismatic gangsters having formed a cinematic staple in the 97 years since D.W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley.
One of the major effects of film censorship was to add a moral dimension to stories played out on screen, so that criminals could not be seen to profit from their acts. This allowed Hollywood producers to have their cake and eat it in the popular gangster movies of the 1930s, showing James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart et al behaving badly, before getting their grisly come uppance.
The phrase 'public enemy number one' was coined in this era by the G-Men who would evolve into the agents of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, men in pursuit of Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Al Capone who were similarly immortalised in film.
Michael Mann tapped into the notoriety of the title with his recent account of Dillinger's life starring Johnny Depp. By coincidence the UK release schedules featured a film called Public Enemy Number One Part 1 for a while, but the risk of confusion was so great that it became Mesrine: Killer Instinct, the first chapter of an epic that concludes with the release later this month of Mesrine: Public Enemy Number 1.
Vincent Cassel - an actor who's appeared in a variety of international films including Irreversible, Ocean's Twelve and Eastern Promises - portrays France's most infamous gangster Jacques Mesrine, a larger than life character who courted the media at the same time as taunting the police and political establishment, earning a dubious kind of respect amongst the French people.
"He had an image like Robin Hood," Cassel explains with a grin, "except that he never gave anything to the poor."
If Mesrine's vocation was criminality - he thought nothing of robbing one bank and then, while getting away, robbing another across the road - his gift was for self promotion. And that means that even now, 30 years after his bloody death on the streets of Paris, he remains an ambiguous and controversial character in France.
"When he was shot by the cops in 1979 he was the favourite celebrity of the French people," says Cassel. "Everybody was hunting him yet couldn't find him, but that year he gave an interview to Paris Match magazine insulting and threatening the government."
Mesrine, like gangsters before and since, clearly revelled in the public image he projected and was doubtless inspired by the criminal anti-heroes depicted he had seen in the movies - a particular staple of French cinema dating back to the likes of Pépé le Moko.
There is less poetic realism to Jean-Francois Richet's riveting double bill, this is gritty filmmaking that takes us to the dark heart of a fascinating central character. But it took seven years in development hell to get it right, key to which was the decision to tell his story in two films made back to back.
"It took a long time working towards a good script, finding the right director and raising the money," explains Cassel, who has been with the project throughout its tortuous journey. "The good thing about that is that in seven years I really had time to read everything written by Mesrine and about Mesrine, and to meet people who actually knew him. I collected a lot of information.
"When we started the project the director was Barbet Schroeder, and I think he was really, really close to that era, he was politically involved in it, up to the point that I think he was a fan of Jacques Mesrine. We were talking about the script and he was saying 'and then the bad guys come in,'. I said 'who are the bad guys?' and he said: 'the cops,'.
"I said; 'Barbet, it's not possible we can spend four hours with a guy who is the bad guy, and you think he's the good guy!'. I tried to talk him and the writer into making him a more complex character, but they didn’t want to go that way. So I dropped out of the movie. But the thing is," he adds with a smile, "I was bluffing."
Such chutzpah, of which Mesrine would doubtless approve, paid off when Schroeder left the project. Cassel made contact with producer Thomas Langmann again and declared himself ready to take on the role of Jacques Mesrine once more, provided they could crack the problem of how to tell the story.
"Thomas came up with the idea of Abdel Raouf Defri who's a great French screenwriter," the actor nods, "and as he started to write something he said we should make two movies. When I read what he'd written it was exactly what I was waiting for, because you don’t know what to think of this character from one scene to the next. For me that's exactly the sort of man Mesrine was."
ANWAR BRETT
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