Interview: Jean Reno, actor

Published on Tuesday 31 August 2010 10:54

Jean Reno has developed a theory about Avatar. "Do you realise that when you watch it, it's what you've been doing since the beginning of going to the movies? When you go to a movie, you sit and you lose your legs! The things that will appear on screen will be your avatar and tell you a story."

• Jean Reno. Pic: PA

Hollywood's favourite Frenchman is expounding on James Cameron's sci-fi colossus primarily because he's due to start work on a 3D sci-fi movie of his own next year (Fantomas), but he's so fascinated by the process of making movies it's easy to see why the fanciful analogy appeals to him.

Take his latest film, 22 Bullets, in which he plays a Marseilles mobster left for dead after being shot with the titular cache of ammunition. To the average viewer it might seem like a slick French crime thriller about a violent killer with blood on his hands trying to escape his past by building a new life with his family.

To Reno, however, his character's journey is much more.

"It's about taking an audience from extreme violence to the tears and extreme tenderness and - ha-ha - making him nice! He's an assassin, but by the end, it is giving you the opportunity to show the colours and paradoxes of human beings."

Reno tells me this while perched in a hotel room ahead of the film's Edinburgh International Film Festival premiere. The 62-year-old acting veteran has an amusing tendency to pepper his effusive answers with playful turns of phrase and disparate ideas like this. He also has enough charisma to get away with talking about professional relationships in terms of love affairs without sounding like a stereotypical Frenchman.

The latter happens when discussion turns to his former collaborator Luc Besson. Though 22 Bullets is not a Besson production, for a while it inspired much online excitement among fans who thought the involvement of Besson's company in the film's French release made this a reunion of sorts.

That such excitement exists is understandable, given that the pair made some of the most memorable films of the 1980s and 1990s together.

They first met in on the set of a comedy on which Besson was the assistant director and Reno had a small role. "That was when the love story started," Reno smiles.The same year, Besson cast Reno in his short film L'avant dernier, which they subsequently expanded into Besson's first feature The Last Battle, before going on to make Subway, The Big Blue, Nikita and the American-set hitman thriller Lon together. It was the success of the latter that made Reno an international star - but also seemed to bring their partnership to an end. "(Luc] is a lonely guy, but that's OK, I'm OK with that," sighs Reno. "At one point the love story has to continue with other people, because, you know, it is always a relationship of desire between directors and actors. You have to explore yourself and go to find new relationships."

Reno found plenty of new relationships in Hollywood. Beginning with a prominent supporting role in the first Mission: Impossible movie, he became - and remains - Tinseltown's go-to Frenchman, cropping up in everything from trashy blockbusters such as Godzilla and The Da Vinci Code, to quality thrillers such as Ronin, and comedies such as The Pink Panther remakes.

He likes the people in Hollywood, but he's aware of how directors and casting agents view him. "A frog for them will stay a frog." The trick is not to get typecast. "If you can change colours that's better," he says, embarking on a somewhat confusing dialogue with both himself and me to illustrate the inequities of the casting process.

"I have several colours but they give you one stamp and they don't f***ing change the stamp because they think in product.

"I don't think in product. This one is very good because it can make you light green, but the other one is dark. No. You have another one? Ah, blue. Ah, maybe I can change the green into blue. If you understand that and can make them understand that you have several colours and are trustable in several colours, well, you're the king of the hill."

Reno roars with laughter after this little diatribe. He's aware of how tortuous his metaphors can sound translated into English. When I ask him, for instance, if working with Robert De Niro in Ronin was a career highlight, he launches into a strained football parable about being star-struck by David Beckham, flavouring it with eccentric praise for the versatility of his Da Vinci Code co-star Tom Hanks ("He can be a lamp, he can be a glass") before finishing off by outlining his philosophy for a happy life.

"You don't have to be Elvis Presley to live happy. You can be someone who has two olive trees or whatever and you can have a decent life.

"You get a wife and you're happy to make love with her and have a baby, instead of, woah, trying to be Michael Jackson alone in a golden tower. It is true! I mean it, I mean it, I mean it."

A question about choosing roles can inspire similar bemusement. "Sometimes it comes through the people I get to work with, sometimes it's because of a specific challenge.The last one I did they said, 'We need a guru.' So it happened like that."

It takes me a second to realise he's referring to the terrible US comedy Couple's Retreat in which he starred with Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn as a martial arts mystic who runs a luxury holiday camp for couples with relationship troubles.

"We did a lot of diving," he continues. "I showed them sharks and things like that. It was happy." He beams, then remembers my original question and adds in quickly that the "story is very important too", lest he gives the impression that his acting work is a paid vacation.

Not that there's anything wrong with someone taking pleasure in his or her profession, of course. Reno's always good value, something that can probably be attributed to the passion for performing he acquired growing up in Casablanca.

"We did school plays and I fell in love with being someone else around crazy people." A beat. "And the women also. When you go to the make-up room full of women, it's fantastic."

After a spot of enforced military service, he got his first proper break courtesy of legendary Greek director Costa-Gavras, who spotted him in a play and gave him a role in a movie called Womanlight in 1979. He's never looked back, starring in more than 70 films and moving in the kind of circles that allow him to count French president Nicolas Sarkozy as one of his best friends, so much so that he recruited him to be the best man at his wedding in 2006. "I've known him for 18 years," shrugs Reno. "He said to me, I would like to be your best man, so I said, 'Yes, why not?'"

How did they meet? "We were neighbours. He had a dog and I had a dog at the time. But I don't speak politics with him. Too boring."

• 22 Bullets is released on Friday.