I’ve always liked Vincent Cassel as an actor, and I found him dirty-hot for years, although my attraction to him has waned recently. Like he’d ever have me, I know – his second wife is gorgeous and very young. Occasionally, he says problematic things but I sometimes wonder if some nuance is being lost in translation. Anyway, Vincent is back, sort of. He just finished his turn on Westworld’s Season 3, and that’s how he ended up speaking with Inverse about futurism in art, computers, and whether he’d ever do a superhero movie. Some highlights:
Whether he would upload his brain into a host to live forever: “Well, I would say people do this already. We change bits and pieces of our bodies when we need to live longer. Think about a heart transplant or whatever you can have nowadays. They do prosthetics with chrome and cobalt, very high tech stuff. Some leg prosthetics are intelligent so they can imitate a walking person. We are doing it and we will do it more and more. They plug things into people’s brains so blind people can start to see, or eventually, you can have a microphone that resonates through your skull so if you’re deaf you can still hear. These are already things that people are adding nowadays. If we can live longer and still jump around and think faster and not lose our consciousness. I guess we’ll do it. Yes, I think I would.
On his breakthrough film, La Haine: “We were young and angry, and we were dreaming of changing everything. We knew that we were doing something special, something different. For French cinema of that era, we definitely were doing something different.
Whether he would ever do a comic-book movie: “Honestly, these are not movie-movies I watch anymore. When they came up with the technology and the fact that suddenly Iron Man or Spider-Man could look real and not tacky in the special effects, I was interested. Then, it became normal. I was a big fan of the comics at the time when I was a kid. Nowadays, I think these are movies for kids, really. And even though I still have a part of me who’s a kid, I would say no. I wouldn’t watch it. Maybe if you had a great villain and it’s done with by somebody who’s really intelligent and talented enough to give it a twist so it doesn’t look like a movie for kids, then maybe I would do it. But otherwise, no. The few approaches that I had, I felt like it would have been a long time commitment for something that I wouldn’t even watch to the end.
La Haine was the first thing I ever saw him in and it was a very “a star is born” kind of moment. There was something so raw about that film and that performance. As for what he says about comic-book movies… I’m glad he didn’t make it about “oh, I’m above such bourgeois commericalism” because he’s shown that he’s not above it – he’s been in the Ocean’s Eleven franchise, he’s been in a Bourne movie (which I never saw), he’s been in big studio films. It’s not anti-commercialism, it’s just that he doesn’t think comic-book movies are his vibe. And… I mean, I kind of think he’s right some of the time? Not All Comic Book Movies, obviously, but many of them are meant for kids/teens.
Photos courtesy of WENN, Backgrid.
