Vincent Cassel Quotes

1. I think I'm actually more vulnerable than people imagine.






2. My father is best known for his light comedies, and I'm best known for crazy bad guys with short tempers.

3. (when asked what he would do if the world was to end in 5 minutes.) Until today I would have said: "get into a plane and jump out with a parachute." Now that I've done it, I would say: "make love for the last time hoping that it is my wife who is at my side."

4. I love playing baddies.

5. (On press interest in his marriage with Monica Bellucci) Oh, well you know, all European media is not the same. I'm sure that like in England, they can be much more bothering than in France, for example. In Paris, it's okay. We have very separate lives when we're working, working wise. I think that it's fine.

6. (On his wife, Monica Bellucci) Her best asset of actress - and woman too! - is not her beauty, but her intelligence. Her intelligence of people and of things. She is very perspicacious, very attentive with the others and has a great faculty to put them at ease. To work with her, I would say, to put besides any concept of couple, that it is as when I find Mathieu (Kassovitz): together, one goes more directly to essence. Plus, she is an incredible hard worker. She has a curiosity of cinema which is rare. She is moved by the directors, she is very listening…In general, I recognize it, I am interested more in the actors than in the actresses - is already well to recognize it! But her, she has something that few actresses have. A manner of exceeding reality, of making dream. I like to look at her playing…

7. (On Irreversible (2002)) Yeah, I think that there is something saying: I say the line that revenge is a human right. I don't think that it's a human right, but it's a normal reaction.


8. I'm a little angry in life.


9. The day after I had my licence to drive I made Paris/Nice at 230 km/hour.

10. Pimps are pimps, whores are whores, transvestites are transvestites, drugs are not drugs actually, it was lactose.

11. 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.

12. I started to make movies and wanted to be an actor because of the movies…in Italy in the sixties or in America in the seventies and I thought that those people working together over and over again, exploring what they had to do in common was very inspiring. 

13. So, I've always dreamed about this. So, to work with Monica, all those people, and Monica is not French, but she's been around for a while now, but yeah, I like it. Honestly, I think that it's a very nice way to make movies, you know. If you can make movies that you can go and eat with, it's pretty cool.

14. 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.

15. 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. There was nothing dark or anything like that on set.





16. I actually love the movie because I think that the movie has such a subversive attitude. I'm really proud of it, but as a character and as an actor, I do like this.

17. No, I'm very proud of it. It wasn't made to make money. We wanted to make an object that people would see and study. The film makes you realize what you can lose when you think everything is OK. If Gaspar wanted to work with me and Monica again, we'd do it.

18. I think that it's a very bleak and very dark statement, but I think that in the particular case of this movie, it's provocative, and it's a way to push the audience to realize what they have before it's too late. I don't take it as a truth in itself. I think that it's more of a way to provoke people.




19. I'm not going to tell you the story of my life, but sometime, I did, and it's not the best thing that I did. When I resent something, I try to…I don't think that it's the solution to anything.

20. I've known Gaspar for a while, both as a director and as a party-goer. I didn't think he'd use me and Monica because he'd want to use real people rather than actors.


21. 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.

22. Anyway he came up to us one night at a party and asked if we wanted to make the movie that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman just missed making with "Eyes Wide Shut". Initially he said it should be a pornographic movie, but we told him there was no way we could do that. Then he came back and said it would be a story told backwards, like Harold Pinter's "Betrayal". We raised the money in two months and shot the film within five days.

23. It was a crazy experience because it was totally improvised. Gaspar gave us a guide of just five-to-ten lines for each scene, and we didn't know how long the scene would last. It was very tiring.

24. You have the feeling of stage fright because you don't know what's going to happen, and you have to be ready for anything. And it's hard to build up a character, because you don't have any material to work with. You have to let yourself go as much as you can, and you have to use the reality around you.

25. (on playing villainous characters, notably Jacques Mesrine) People pretend to be nice, people pretend to be smooth, and polite and everything, but this is only an appearance because the way we're built as human beings is only in paradox and contradictions. So I guess, you know, when I read so-called baddies, I think they're more human than heroes most of the time.


26. The minute your parents die, you stop fighting them. I realized the more I changed my face for films, the more I looked like him. I always liked to disguise myself because I was trying to run away from his image. But all that is not worth it. You can't escape from what you are.

27. I feel like the so-called bad guys are never totally bad. I guess it's the closest thing I can do to reality: people act nice but nobody really is nice. We all have to balance that with something dark. How we balance it is what makes something interesting…My character in "La Haine," he's not bad, he's unhappy and usually people are like that. Most of us are angry. (breaks off, then laughs) Maybe one day I'll play Buddha.

28. (on "Irreversible") I knew we were taking part in something that wasn't for everyone. It was really strong and powerful. When we went to show it at Cannes, I was scared and excited like a terrorist who had put a bomb in a church.

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