Vincent Cassel breaks gangster mold in 'Trance'

Vince Cassel, whose brilliant performance in the dark psychosexual thriller "Black Swan" opposite Natalie Portman stars in anew in the twisted psychological thriller "Trance."

 

In "Trance," Cassel stars with James McAvoy and Rosario Dawson where director Academy-Award winner Danny  Boyle dives back into the heart of extreme human behavior, this time taking audiences on the journey into the fluid, enticing, unreliable world of the subconscious. 

 

The movie features three main roles with the same intense challenge: Simon (McAvoy), Cassel (Franck) and Elizabeth (Dawson) none of them are who or what they might seem at first meeting.  These uniquely unreliable protagonists, each mired in the mysteries of identity, attraction and illusion, would require careful casting, but drew the kind of talented actors who hanker for complex roles right away.   

 

"Trance" begins with an adeptly-planned heist at an auction house which goes violently awry when the auctioneer inside man takes a blow to the head leaving him with no memory of where the stashed the stolen Goya painting.  The story quickly turns into a high stakes triangle – the painting’s amnesiac thief (James McAvoy), his fearsome partner in crime, gang-leader (Vincent Cassel), and the alluring hypnotist (Rosario Dawson) hired to help recover his lost memories – as they all become trapped together in a brain-bending puzzle of their own making. 

 

“What I liked about the film is that it starts as something normal but by the 25th page it becomes something else entirely.  It's a genre bender.  It really messes with you,” says Cassel. “It’s not quite clear who's good or who's bad.  At first, you might think one thing and then it becomes something else and then, by the end, it's something else entirely. Characters evolve. You get caught when you judge somebody. Suddenly you realize that it's not exactly what you thought it was.”

 

Boyle was thrilled to have an actor of Cassel’s intensity take one side of the film’s twisting triangle. “The guy’s as good an actor as you’ll ever find on this planet,” says Boyle.  “You also have to remember that, although he speaks very good English, the dialogue is obviously not in his own language, but you see beyond that when you watch him act. It’s rare to come across an actor like that.”

 

Cassel was equally intrigued by Boyle’s skills. “His directing is always very visual and original and even baroque. But it’s never just for style. He always has a meaning. The frame might be different and modern, but it always tells a story,” he observes. 

 

In the bones of the story lies a 180-degree turn for Franck, which screenwriter John Hodge notes is key to the character.  “On the surface, Franck is a fairly straightforward gangster, but I think he is slowly revealed as rather more human than that – possibly even a character with whom I think we might sympathize,” he says. “Through the story, he discovers something about himself, which is that there’s more to him than the gangster he’d written himself off as.”

 

With Franck and his gang (Danny Sapani, Matt Cross, Wahab Sheikh), Boyle and Hodge wanted to steer the characters away from popular perception of modern London gangsters. “There’s a lot of territory out there that’s already been covered,” says Boyle. “We wanted to move away from that, so one of the first premises of the casting was to try and break that pattern. And one of the ways that we did it is to cast a guy who was very refreshing. If he was in a French film, I think Cassel would be too familiar as a gangster. But of course in our context, it was perfect.”

 

Rated R16, "Trance" opens May 1 in theaters nationwide from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros. Press release and photos from 20th Century Fox