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. – Vincent Cassel
What I think I’m perceived as in France is, like, I’m this leading man always doing strange movies because most of the movies I did, like ‘Irreversible’ or ‘Brotherhood of the Wolf’ and a bunch of others, and even in France, they always come out as a particular movie, not like the typical French kind of movies that people know most of the time. – Vincent Cassel
My father is best known for his light comedies, and I’m best known for crazy bad guys with short tempers. – Vincent Cassel
The first important movie that I did, I shaved my head for the movie. When the hair grew back, I had white hair for the first time in my life. – Vincent Cassel
People ask me where I live most of the time, and it’s kind of complicated for me to answer, because I’m not really sure. It’s somewhere in between London, Rome, Paris, and Rio. – Vincent Cassel
My character in ‘La Haine,’ he’s not bad; he’s unhappy, and usually, people are like that. Most of us are angry. – Vincent Cassel
In Italy, it is difficult to see a film in the original language because the voice actors here are a mafia. – Vincent Cassel
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. – Vincent Cassel
I’m moving to Rio permanently with my family. It’s one of the places left in the world where people still live with a big charge of poetry on a daily basis. I feel we’ve kind of lost that here in Europe. – Vincent Cassel
Many times, I have heard people saying that they don’t like to work with their wife or husband, but to me, it is a plus. To work with somebody you love makes filming faster, more fun. – Vincent Cassel
I wear a lot of wigs as Jacques Mesrine. He’d wear multiple wigs and take them off one at a time to rob three banks in one hour. – Vincent Cassel
When you appear on the screen, often enough you become sexy, even if you look like an elephant. – Vincent Cassel
I guess I look strange a bit. Strange but confident. I’m not like a model or anything. I always compare this to wearing a hat. You can wear the strangest hat, but if you think it’s cool, then you’ll look cool. – Vincent Cassel
I don’t really shop any more. I only do it when I have to. I think it is very overrated. – Vincent Cassel
When eventually I started to act a bit more, I realised that circus school had taught me something that a lot of actors my age didn’t have: physicality. They didn’t know how to move. Acting is not all about talking. There is something animalistic about it. – Vincent Cassel
I used to be more self-conscious about style because when you’re younger, you want to exist, you want to show everything you do. – Vincent Cassel
When you see violence in movies in general, it’s very quick and painless, which isn’t what it’s like. – Vincent Cassel
I ran away from three different boarding schools before joining a circus school, and eventually I became an actor. The only thing I learned at boarding school was never to send my child to one. – Vincent Cassel
I know that what I see in every religious person is not something I want to teach my kids. – Vincent Cassel
Female influence came from my grandmother and my aunt. They would sing Corsican love songs while cleaning the house and dress all in black and say melodramatic things like: ‘I want to die.’ – Vincent Cassel
I’m actually beginning to believe that there is something in common among all of my characters. I’m not sure what it is exactly. But I guess that something is me. – Vincent Cassel
I love French style from the Thirties and Forties. French movie stars like Jean Gabin and Yves Montand had so much natural, effortless style. – Vincent Cassel
The few times in my life where I had four or five movies in a row, it was a nightmare. I felt trapped. I felt like my life was planned for a year and a half or two years, and it was terrible. Most of the time, everything collapsed. – Vincent Cassel
I have a tendency to think that when you portray baddies in movies, they come out more human than good guys. – Vincent Cassel
I was thinking of going to London drama schools or to New York, because France didn’t accommodate the things I wanted to do in film. – Vincent Cassel