European Films

 

2008 French Shooting Star Nicolas Cazalé is not the latest pretty-boy actor to be catapulted from obscurity to fame by a single box-office success. Instead, in the space of a couple of years, the 30-year-old actor has quietly built an impressive résumé of starring or co-starring roles in smaller films. His latest project, the schizophrenic love story Caótica Ana (Chaotic Ana) from Spanish auteur Julio Medem, is again unlikely to top the cinema charts when it will be released in the Netherlands on June 5 and in Belgium on August 6. But at least it is something of which Cazalé can be proud, as he told Boyd van Hoeij during the most recent Berlinale.

 

Nothing seems to unite a skinhead older brother just released from jail and a slightly lost but essentially decent son taking over his father’s grocery when the latter becomes gravely ill, but both were credibly brought to life by Cazalé in two vastly different films. For an actor who seems to completely disappear in his roles, it is not surprising that the way he chooses his roles has less to do with the specific characters he plays than with a feeling of mutual trust and appreciation between the actor and his director.

"I work with people that I like and respect," explains Cazalé, as if it were the most normal thing in the film industry. "I need to see the person opposite me. After that, we can also talk about what he wants to do as a director, but first I need to meet him and get to know him as a person. This is important if you are going to work together intensely for three months; you need to be on the same wavelength".

 

Cazalé played the skinhead in Gaël Morel’s tale of three brothers Le Clan (Three Dancing Slaves), while he also played the title role in Eric Guirado’s Le Fils de l’épicier (The Grocer’s Son). Says Cazalé: “I like and admire Gaël Morel and Eric Guirado and that is why I have worked with them. I knew their previous work and was ready to be part of their universe".

 

Though he is most famous for these two vastly different roles, the actor says it is a complete coincidence the films were both made by relatively young directors whose careers are still being formed. "Young directors take risks," explains Cazalé, "because there is an inherent risk associated with taking on young and quite inexperienced actors. You get that less with experienced directors, though fundamentally, my approach to the work does not depend on the age or the experience of the director. I don’t care if the director is young or old, experienced or not. I just want to make an interesting film with a person that I think is interesting too.

 

"Of course the script is important," continues the actor, "but first I’d like to meet the director in an informal setting, say a bar or a café, and then we’ll talk about ourselves and what we like in terms of cinema and then I’ll read the script. I don’t really think about my future as an actor in terms of strategy. It is not: I’ve done a drama, now I need to do a comedy or I’ve worked with a rookie, now I need to work with a veteran director. Whatever is meant to happen, will happen".

 

In terms of his talent, Cazalé finds it hard to define what it is exactly that he can bring to a role that he is offered. After a long and pensive silence, he says: "I guess, I give the characters I play my emotions and my body. I incarnate them, if you will, but that is something that goes beyond the words I say, or what the script dictates. The character becomes human, so perhaps, I’ve given them my humanity".

 

An equally difficult question is which role has been his most challenging role to date. After another silence in which one can almost hear the gears grinding in his brain, the actor says: "[The role of Friday in the TV two-parter] Robinson Crusoë. Because the character is completely different from myself. I had to invent a point of view, a way of approaching the material, a new way of walking. There were so many things that I didn’t have in me for that role, that I just had to imagine. I’d like to do that again – play a role that is so far away from my own experiences. You always need to try something challenging, something a bit dangerous".

 

As for his latest project, Julio Medem’s Caótica Ana, Cazalé sees this film in the context of a booming European cinema. Says Cazalé: I believe that we [as Shooting Stars] can count ourselves extremely lucky to be Europeans and to be in this profession. I did a Spanish film, for example, Caótica Ana, which is a love story. But the Spanish do not look at love the same way as we do at home. Every country and every person talks about love, but everyone does it differently, which is what makes European cinema so rich and diverse. This is extremely important [to understand], and that is why I really hope that I can continue to work in European cinema".