VINCENT CASSEL: FRANCE'S MOST WANTED

JACQUES MESRINE, THE GALLIC GOODFELLA

By Stephen Applebaum

Jacques Mesrine may not be a household name in the UK but in France he is an icon for the current generation of rebellious youth.

In the 1970s, he robbed, killed and kidnapped his way to the title of public enemy no. 1. His disguises earned him the nickname “man of a thousand faces”. But even as he hid from the police, Mesrine taunted the French authorities by giving interviews to journalists and appearing regularly, half-disguised, on the cover of Paris Match. His luck eventually ran out, however, and he was gunned down on a busy Paris street, in 1979, in an officially-sanctioned operation that remains controversial.

Since his death, Mesrine has morphed into a Che Guevara-like figure for some of France's young. Hip-hop kids sport his image on T-shirts while rappers reference him. His exploits have, inevitably, inspired movies, the latest of which, Mesrine – released in two instalments, Killer Instinct and Public Enemy – stormed the French box office last year and earned its electrifying star, Vincent Cassel, a Cesar for best actor (the French equivalent of an Oscar).

When I meet Cassel in London, he is quick to distance himself from Mesrine's admirers. “I am not a Mesrine fan,” he states emphatically. “I'm interested in Mesrine because I'm an actor. But I don't think, 'Oh, he's so great! I always wanted to be Mesrine!'”

Cassel's volatile skinhead in his 1995 breakthrough film, La Haine, might have idolised the gangster. But when the actor was presented with a script that softened Mesrine, and a director, the veteran film-maker Barbet Schroeder, who wanted to portray the cops as the bad guys, he balked. “It was like, he's not that racist. He's not that violent. He's not that bad with the girls. But he's still really brave and funny,” remembers Cassel. “I said, 'No, I'm not going to be in a four-hour movie to say that.' The interesting thing about the character is that he's looked up to as a hero and he is not,” suggests Cassel. “How did he do that? Why? That's what I wanted to explore, more than just being a Robin Hood.”

Unable to change the film's direction, he removed himself. “But it was a bluff,” Cassel admits, smiling. “Maybe it's very pretentious, but I always thought this movie would not be made without me.”

He was right: after Schroeder dropped out, Mesrine was re-booted, this time with people from Cassel's generation – the film director Jean-Francois Richet and screenwriter Abdel Raouf Dafri – in creative control. “The movie became what I dreamt about from the beginning,” he enthuses. “Meaning that we needed a script where you didn't know what to think from one scene to the other. We never judge the character, we just show everything. What you think about the character at the end of the movie reflects you as a person.”

Although Cassel never knew Mesrine personally, for anyone who likes playing the Six Degrees of Separation game there is nonetheless a tenuous link between him and the cocky criminal: Gerard Lebovici, the agent of Vincent's actor father, Jean-Pierre, adopted Mesrine's daughter, Sabrina, and gave Mesrine's family money when he was in prison.

"Ah, yes,” says Cassel, briefly baffled by the idea of a connection. “Lebovici died [in 1984] with four bullets in the forehead in a square shape,” he recalls. “This is an un-honoured contract. He was a very smart man, very powerful, and very dark. He had the life of movie-making and on the other side he was the publisher of revolutionary books. The only thing we know is that in his agenda, the latest meeting he had was with F. B., and people thought about Francois Besse [Mesrine's sometime accomplice, played in the film by Mathieu Amalric].”

Playing Mesrine was a gift for the actor whose own chameleon-like ability to dramatically transform himself on screen initially allowed him to keep the press at bay. Marrying Monica Bellucci, whom he met when they worked together on 1996's The Apartment, has since made him one half of Europe's most glamorous couple. But even now Cassel says he can control the attention.

The “problem”, he says, is television. “When people just read about you, you still have a certain kind of distance. When they see you on talk shows and game shows, then you totally lose, because you're becoming their buddy.” His solution is to disappear between projects. “If you have another life, if you're not just this guy on TV, and you have other ways to fulfil yourself, then it's okay. It's not that bad.”

Cassel's profile will almost certainly rise on the back of Mesrine. He has already appeared in films outside France, of course, including Ocean's Twelve, Birthday Girl and Eastern Promises, and for many observers he is already the Gerard Depardieu of his generation. Cassel himself frequently cites the legendary actor as an inspiration, although he's also accused him in interviews of squandering his talent. They have some memorable scenes together in Mesrine, but I wonder if Cassel's comments made things awkward on set. “I can talk freely about this because I had this discussion with him,” he says surprisingly.

"He's really fascinating, but at the same time it looks like his desire's . . .” Waned? “I don't want to be rude but it's like when you have a hard-on: it's not normal, it's magical, and one day you won't have it anymore. So it's not forever. And if you spoil yourself, almost prostitute yourself, doing things for the money, at some point you don't respect what you do anymore.”

Cassel insists that he still admires Depardieu. However, he was not so in awe of him that he did not comment when the actor forgot his lines. “Of course I'm rude,” he laughs. “It doesn't change anything about the respect that I have for him, but if you play tennis in Wimbledon with somebody, if the guy didn't prepare, f**k him!”

He hopes they will work together again. In the meantime, though, he is building a house in Rio, preparing for a shoot in Australia, and has recently finished work on a road movie about two alienated redheads. Clearly there is no sign of Cassel's hunger waning. And if it ever does, he knows what he'll do.

"I will disappear. My desire will then come back and when I'm on the set I'm there because I want to be there. Not because I have to be.”

Mesrine: Killer Instinct is out now; Mesrine: Public Enemy No.1 is released 28 August

This story first appeared in The Big Issue, August 3-9, 2009

ANDREA ARNOLD TALKS FISH TANK

By STEPHEN APPLEBAUM

Anyone who saw Andrea Arnold's raw and disturbing debut feature, Red Road, knows that she is a film-maker who likes honesty. She is the same in person, and gently makes it known right from the start that I will not get many answers from her about her new film, Fish Tank, for which she shared the Jury Prize at Cannes last month with South Korea's Chan-wook Park.

It is not the most promising start to an interview. But the 48-year-old Dartford-born film-maker is not being difficult or deliberately evasive. "There's just lots of things in the film I don't understand," she says, before implying that this might change over time. "I sometimes discover things later and think, 'Ah, that's why I did that.' "

Still, she'll have to get used to talking about her work because with just two features, and three shorts, including 2003's Oscar-winning Wasp, Arnold has established herself as one of Britain's most exciting writer-directors. She puts her lack of understanding down to the way she creates her screenplays: from the heart, not the head. Pure intuition guides her writing. "I usually have an image I start exploring and however it comes out is how it comes out," she explains, refusing to reveal the image that kicked off Fish Tank for fear it gives too much away. "I let the characters live and not question them or judge them and follow them around. I really think thinking is not a good thing to do when you're trying to write something. You shouldn't think. Thinking is bad."

Fish Tank is effectively her first top-to-bottom feature, in the sense that everything came directly from her. She made the Glasgow-set Red Road at the request of The Advance Party, a Danish project inspired by Lars von Trier, who challenged Arnold and two other directors to create films with the same group of characters. Arnold's response was a gritty tale of revenge and obsession that made powerful use of the forests of CCTV cameras that either spy on or protect – depending on your point of view – the people of Glasgow. Daring and disturbing, the film won a slew of awards, including five Scottish Baftas and the Jury Prize in Cannes.

Although the kudos she garnered from Red Road helped to pave the way for Fish Tank, film-making is not about prizes or acclaim for Arnold, she says. "I've got a nice new quote that I read," she says, " 'Do not worship the bitch goddesses of success and applause.' It isn't about that, you know? It shouldn't be about that." Then again, she knows in her heart that it is "that" which "helps you get other things made. And that matters. You want to get other things made."

This should not be a problem if the response to Fish Tank in Cannes is any indicator of future success. The film was one of the critics' favourites to win the Palme d'Or, and there are still those who think it should have done. At its centre is a powerful performance by Katie Jarvis, a non-actor at the time (she has since got an agent, Arnold says), who was found by Arnold's casting assistant on a train station in Tilbury, Essex, where she lives.

"She was having an argument with her boyfriend," Arnold recalls. "She was giving him a bit of grief, I think, across the platform, and so stood out. She didn't believe us at all that we were looking for somebody for a film. But when we gave her our number she called up and we got her to come for a little audition."

Whoever got the role would have to do a lot of dancing in the film, but Jarvis hated dancing – she still does, apparently. "We had to leave the camera in the room and go out so that she could just dance to the camera." Unlike the dancers they had looked at, who would put on a kind of show, Jarvis gave them something else. "She was just bopping around the room and she was very much herself," says Arnold, who started out as a professional dancer on TV shows such as Top of the Pops, before becoming a children's TV presenter. "It was a big risk because the dancing was quite important. But I thought, 'Well, that works in a different way.' "

Won over, Arnold cast Jarvis as Mia, a 15-year-old growing up in a high-rise block on an Essex council estate just off the A13, who has her world turned upside down when her mother (Kierston Wareing) brings home a charming new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender).

Jarvis's naturalism leant itself well to the gritty realism that is Arnold's signature. And because she knew nothing about the craft of acting, she was "fearless", says the director admiringly. "I think some actors, when they've done a lot, they get more conscious about what they're doing so they get more fearful about what might work or might not work. Katie had no fear."

Arnold knows the environment that Mia lives in well, having grown up in a "similar" one. And where some viewers might see bleakness, she saw beauty. She is actually amazed that other people do not see the film's Essex setting the same way. "It's got really wild spaces. And even that block of flats, there's loads of people there. There's lots of kids. Lots of energy. I don't see it as a bad place. There's this clichéd idea that estates are awful. They're not."

Likewise the characters in her films are impossible to pigeonhole, and cannot be written off simply as either good or bad. She goes beyond the clichés of "broken Britain" and dangerous youth, giving people back the humanity that some parts of the media and the entertainment industry take away. "There are films made with hoodies being the aggressors and beating everybody up, but they're just kids."

According to a recent Unicef report, Britain has the world's unhappiest children, she says. "We're the fifth country in the world and yet there's more kids living in poverty. There are reasons why those kids go out and do what they do. We should be asking questions, not accusing or judging. They're kids. They get very bad press."

Simply blaming people like Mia's feckless mother is not the answer either, she argues. "You can't blame the parents, because what was their life like? I don't know, there are lots of things I can't answer. But there are certainly questions."

And no doubt she will continue to raise them in future films. Right now she is unsure what the next project will be, although there are plenty of things "bothering" her that she wants to look into when the hubbub surrounding Fish Tank dies down. Ultimately, an idea will rise to the surface and she will be compelled to follow it. "It's not like I have a choice, really. I just have to keep doing it. It's like an obsession. I have to keep exploring things."

Fish Tank is released September 11

Published in The Scotsman: 13 June 2009

Getting away with murder?

Picture: Charles Manson, 2009

Getting away with murder?

Sunday Times (UK)/July 11, 2004
By Stephen Applebaum

He was jailed more than three decades ago, yet Charles Manson - career criminal, failed rock star, guru, shyster, psychopath, mass murderer - will not go away. On the contrary, 35 years after his followers "creepy-crawled" into the Los Angeles homes of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, on August 9 and 10, 1969, respectively, and brutally slew the occupants, three new films - Jim Van Bebber 's startling The Manson Family, John Gray's Helter Skelter and John Roecker's stop-motion Live Freaky! Die Freaky! - suggest that interest in Manson and his psychedelic cult, the Family, is as strong as ever.

Why now? Why not? According to Vincent Bugliosi, the man who prosecuted Manson and then co-wrote Helter Skelter, the bestselling book about the case, Manson still receives more mail than any other inmate in the history of the American prison system. "Who is writing to him? Young, impressionable kids going through a rebellious phase view him as some type of anti-establishment hero, a glorious outlaw." His face adorns T-shirts, belt buckles, even thongs and posters ("He's a punk-rock icon," says Roecker), while his music has been recorded by the likes of Guns N' Roses, the Lemonheads and Marilyn Manson.

Gray, disapprovingly, calls it a "culture of cool". "I don't think people really remember, or have a clear enough idea, what he was responsible for," he says. "You've got all these pro-Manson and 'free Manson' websites, and it's pretty disgusting." To counter this shift in perception, Gray's remake of the wildly successful 1976 miniseries Helter Skelter shifts the focus away from the police investigation and towards Manson himself, exploiting our fascination to turn it into revulsion. At least, that is the hope. "I wanted to shine a bit of light on who he really was," explains Gray, whose film screened on the US network CBS in May. "He was a racist, he hated women and he was a cold-blooded murderer."

He was also the man who blew the hippie dream, suggests Van Bebber. And that, he believes, makes Manson relevant now. "As a society, we miss the freedom, the experimentation, everything that was coming out of the flower power movement. So we've got to look at ourselves and say, 'How did we f*** up?' And one of the most obvious poster boys for the death of the hippie movement and trusting people with long hair who smoke pot is Manson."

The Tate-LaBianca murders sent LA into a state of shock and sparked a media feeding frenzy. When news broke of a "death list" that included Steve McQueen, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra and Tom Jones, the Hollywood glitterati started turning their homes into luxurious fortresses. "You've got to understand, people in Los Angeles at that time left their doors unlocked," says Roecker. "The reason they lock their doors, to this day, is because of Charles Manson. They couldn't understand it. Manson on his own is just another scary man, but then he had these young, innocent cheerleaders go kill for him. People must have thought the whole world had gone completely out of whack."

Van Bebber distrusts Manson's followers more than Manson. "They're the ones who did the killing. I don't care how freaking charismatic he was, they didn't have to. So I don't buy that he brainwashed them. They just bought into his way of thinking, to the point where they said, 'Yeah, screw these people. They deserve to die.' I think you've got to keep the focus on them, because they're much more slippery than Charles Manson, who remains unrepentant."

His film, The Manson Family, explores Manson's world through the eyes of Family figures such as Susan Atkins, Charles "Tex" Watson, Patty Krenwinkel, Linda Kasabian, Leslie Van Houten and Bobby Beausoleil (played by Van Bebber). Footage of the Family shot at the Spahn Movie Ranch, where they dropped acid, engaged in group sex, played dress-up and fatally retreated from reality, all under the guidance of Manson, is meticulously re-created using actors. We hear them talking, using dialogue culled from documentaries, interviews and autobiographies, and get a strong sense of the madness that gradually engulfed them. Restaged news reports from the time of the Manson trial chillingly convey how frightening these people - with their shaven heads, Xs carved into their foreheads and threats of retribution - must have seemed at the time.

The film offers a critique of Vincent Bugliosi's claim that Manson was trying to start a race war based on signals from the Beatles' White Album ("I think all that was just drug talk that Charlie threw out to shock and amaze people") and tries to deflate the almost supernatural aura the prosecutor created around Manson. "Bugliosi would have you think Charlie stopped his watch during the trial," laughs Van Bebber. "That's not only in his book, it's in the remake as well. I thought, 'Oh my God, haven't you guys gotten over that one yet?'" When it comes to depicting the Tate-LaBianca murders, Van Bebber is unsparing. Shot in almost forensic detail, these scenes defy accusations of exploitation by being too horrific to be enjoyable, exciting or titillating. "I felt a moral imperative to show them that way," says Van Bebber. "If the murders didn't disturb you, I'd have failed in trying to remind you just what this case really is about: that people lost their lives. And all of Manson's rhetoric and all of the drugs and all of the sex really don't mean anything compared to these nights of horror. That's why they're in prison. I really tried to shove people's faces in it, so they don't act so glib about this stuff in future."

None of this probably would have happened, of course, if people had not allowed themselves to be duped by Manson. This is the underlying message of Roecker's puppet-based satire Live Freaky! Die Freaky!, which is currently edging towards completion. Inspired by a time when copies of Helter Skelter seemed to be more ubiquitous in American homes than the Bible, the film is set in the aftermath of an apocalypse, when a group of survivors find Bugliosi's book in the desert. "My point," says Roecker, "is that anyone can take that book, like they do with the Bible, and misinterpret it and use it for their own good. What I'm saying is: be careful what you believe in. Question everything. Question the Bible. Question the constitution. Question what the people in power are doing. The great thing about being a human being is that you can ask questions. People need to realise that, because right now we're back in the 1950s. It's worse than it ever has been, and I want to be able to say that."

From wannabe pop star to murderer to character in a puppet movie: it's been quite a trip for Manson. But it does not end here. The widely held belief is that, far from waning, interest in him is likely to grow. "It will probably get even bigger after he dies," says Van Bebber. "He's a myth now. God help us all when the true mythology and legend kick in." That could be sooner than expected. Toby Sale, of the Exclusive Film Network, a company currently working on an epic documentary about the Manson Family, claims it has unearthed evidence of "judicial corruption" that could "reopen the entire Manson case ... It supports a finding that Manson may not only have designed the murders, but controlled the actual trial outcome for the girl defendants via a deal with certain attorneys."

If this turns out to be true, a new chapter in the Manson saga may be about to begin. God help us all, indeed.

Burma VJ - Reporting from a Closed Country

A free press is a vital component in a democracy. Little wonder, then, that in Burma (also known as Myanmar), where the military have ruled with an iron fist since 1962, attempts to report the truth outside the state-controlled media have often ended in imprisonment, torture, or worse.

Independent reporting in the country, ranked 170th out of 173 in Reporters Without Borders' 2008 world press freedom index, is a dicey pursuit. No-one knows, when they take a bus or walk down the street, whom they can trust. Anyone could be a government agent or an informer. Yet despite the dangers, a growing number of people in Burma are willing to risk their liberty, and lives, to tell their stories to the Burmese themselves and the world outside.

The work of some of these inspiring characters is the subject of a compelling new film, Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, which reveals how a small network of underground reporters working for the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) – a TV station in exile based in Oslo – used video cameras, the internet and satellite communications to alert the world about protests that began as small pockets of dissent in August 2007 and mushroomed into an uprising of thousands of Buddhist monks.

Complete story published in The Scotsman

MEMORIES ARE MADE OF THIS

HOLLYWOOD IS ON THE OFFENSIVE Stephen Applebaum Published in The Scotsman: 07 March, 2002 There is nothing new about blaming society's violence on Hollywood. But did it, as Robert Altman insists, really help to inspire the events of 11 September? Could last year's outrage actually be the worst copycat crime yet? "The movies set the pattern, and these people have copied the movies," Altman told the Hollywood Reporter after the Twin Towers fell. "Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they'd seen it in a movie. How dare we continue to show this kind of mass destruction in movies? We created this atmosphere and taught them how to do it." Altman's remarks are undoubtedly as much a reflection of his own jaundiced view of Hollywood as of a wider reality, for he added that he hoped the outcome would be a return to a more thought-provoking and character-driven cinema. The kind of cinema, in other words, that he represents. But special pleading or not, the question remains: how should Hollywood respond to 11 September? Six months on, it has so far produced patriotic public service announcements that have been playing in American theatres; then, of course, there was the knee-jerk re-editing of existing movies and the hasty re-shuffling of release schedules immediately following the attacks. So far, though, there has been little indication of whether film content will change to echo the post-11 September zeitgeist. Despite appearances, the glut of war movies we are currently experiencing - Black Hawk Down, Behind Enemy Lines, We Were Soldiers - has nothing to do with the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, although their focus on bravery and heroism, cleansed of all self-questioning, chimes well with the times. Probably we are expecting too much too soon from Hollywood. Akiva Goldsman, writer of A Beautiful Mind, lives in New York and watched the Twin Towers crumble from his roof. Talking at last month's Berlin Film Festival, he told me he thought the sense of collective shock was still sinking in. "I think it has affected everything so much more deeply than is easy to characterise. If movies change as a result of 11 September that's just because it has changed everything." "I've always imagined this truth: when death touches your life, you are suddenly less able, and less willing, to wield it whimsically in terms of a construct," he added. "So I've always tried to resist writing things that are particularly violent in anticipation of that. In that sense it was a wake-up call to everyone." So fewer films that bask in violence, perhaps? If so, Berlin offered a few glimpses of what's to come. Kevin Spacey, for example, is surely on to something with an ensemble drama, The United States of Leland, which starts with a horrific act and then tries to understand how it happened, from a multitude of different perspectives. The film, which Spacey is producing, is in tune with the way he thinks we should be dealing with 11 September. "We hear political leaders on television frame the perpetrators of that act as evil, but I don't think that is enough for us as citizens of the United States or elsewhere," he told me in Berlin. "If we don't try to understand how it is those people (the terrorists) got to that place, then we'll never understand the why. And I do believe there is a why. It may be difficult to understand. It may be crazy. But it's too easy to say it's crazy and leave it at that. People have got to educate themselves." Debate is what is needed, a politically clued-up Donald Sutherland told me. "What the nation's built on is discussion, contradiction and growth, and at the moment you can't discuss anything. If you do start to discuss it, you get criticised. If people hate us, you have to find out why and try to solve that problem." What is not the answer, he argued, is to "railroad through an abrogation of the ABM treaty" as Bush has done, nor is it a missile defence system that will cost the country billions. "The reason the United States wants it, and unilaterally wants it, is because it makes them feel like they're better endowed as masculine individuals than the rest of the world. We all know that's a silly idea, in any relationship." Given the atmosphere in America described by Sutherland, it looks unlikely that Hollywood will be in the vanguard of those trying to explore the underlying causes of 11 September. The political film-maker Costa-Gavras fears studios will follow Bush's lead and "start doing movies against terrorism without dipping, a little, into the problem of terrorism, because it's more dramatic and satisfying for the American audience." THE massive success of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage last month- a film delayed after 11 September due to its gung-ho "Arnie vs terrorists" plot - suggests he may be right. Ironically, Mathieu Kassovitz, the French actor/director, has been persuaded by events to return to a project he had almost dropped before 11 September. "I thought I was going too far," he reveals. "But after the plane crashes, I said, 'No, I'm way under reality'." Not one to shy away from difficult subject matter, the controversial director of La Haine says his new film "is a very personal project about us as a species that is going to destroy itself, one day or another. "We are going to see nuclear terrorism or nuclear war during our lifetimes, no doubt about it," says the 34-year-old, chillingly. "Every time we make a warhead, we increase the risk of blowing ourselves up. So how can we avoid it?" That, surely, is the question we should be asking ourselves. © Stephen Applebaum, 2009