France’s Working-Class Hero

It seems like only yesterday that Gerard Depardieu was the enfant terrible of French film, startling filmgoers with his portrayal of an amoral delinquent in “Going Places,” Bertrand Blier’s outrageous 1974 sex comedy.

Nibbling on pasta at a cozy Hollywood eatery, Depardieu is grumpily bemoaning the new generation of lazy, empty-headed French actors. “The young French actors are total egomaniacs,” he growls in halting English. “These acting schools they go to--all they do is turn them inward, not outward.”

Searching for an appropriately scathing image, Depardieu abruptly switches to his native tongue. “They’ve become so self-absorbed,” he says in torrid French through an interpreter. “In my time, we read the classics. Moliere. Shakespeare. Anything we could get our hands on.

“Now, if you ask a French actor to recite from Racine, they wouldn’t know what to do. All they know is Stanislavsky. When I started out 20 years ago, the great actors all had a strong theater background. But the young actors today only think about film.”

He frowns, running a meaty hand through his long mane of hair. “Now our actors do one or two movies and-- voila-- they’re stars. They want everything without doing anything.

“I get letters all the time from parents saying, ‘My son loves the acting profession.’ ”

Depardieu flashes a triumphant smile. “So I reply, ‘That’s wonderful, but does the acting craft love him?’ ”

It’s no secret that the camera loves Depardieu. At 41, he is the working-class hero of French cinema, as honored and beloved as Jean Gabin, Michel Simon, Yves Montand or any other titans of past eras. It’s perhaps a sign of his screen magnetism that when Peter Weir needed a burst of inspiration to finish his script for “Green Card,” he simply put a photo of Depardieu on display at his desk as he wrote.

Though Depardieu made his mark with Blier’s raffish satires, the bulky actor has played everything from a 16th-Century wanderer in “The Return of Martin Guerre” to a baffled modern-day husband in “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs.”

It’s hard to imagine many actors who have ranged so far and wide in the cinema. Depardieu was Danton in Andrzej Wajda’s compelling account of the French Revolution and Rodin in Bruno Nuytten’s “Camille Claudel.” He also picked up best-actor prizes in such films as “The Last Metro” (his only movie with Francois Truffaut) and Maurice Pialat’s “Police.”

American audiences will soon be seeing Depardieu in two of his most formidable challenges. He opens Tuesday as the eloquent swordsman hero of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” which won him the best-actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival. On Sunday, he opens in “Green Card,” Weir’s romantic comedy, which features Depardieu in his first major English-language film as a Frenchman who engineers a marriage of convenience so he can move to America.

As it turns out, language was just as much a barrier making “Cyrano” as it was in “Green Card.” The film, adapted from Edmond Rostand’s classic play, was shot on location in both Hungary and France, using 2,000 actors and extras. Most of the extras were Hungarian.

“That made it very difficult to coordinate everyone’s movements during the big crowd scenes,” he explains. “Since the extras didn’t speak French, they didn’t always know where I was going next. They all look very impressed by my speeches, but most of them didn’t understand a word I was saying!”

Since the film’s dialogue is delivered in Alexandrine verse, which contains 12 syllables in each line (English verse is commonly 10-syllable iambic pentameter), Depardieu found himself choreographing sweeping physical movements and sword play to fit the extended lines of verse.

“We rehearsed the film like we would a play,” says Depardieu, who spent an hour each day having his already ample nose enlarged for the part. “We all sat around a table for two weeks and practiced, so we could visualize how it would work.”

With 60 films to his credit in less than 20 years, Depardieu is an actor who seems obsessed with keeping busy. A chunky man with a torso that looks like it could support a freeway overpass, he says he enjoys carousing at night--but insists he’s always ready for work every morning.

Depardieu jokes that the only time he has free time is when he’s making a movie. “I know it sounds strange, but I like a strict schedule. That’s when I really feel free.”

He’s certainly not enthusiastic about doing in-depth interviews to promote his films. Out with a reporter on a brief visit here, Depardieu only allows an occasional glimpse of the playfulness he displays on movie sets. (He does joke about Warren Beatty’s legendary sexual exploits, but quickly adds that the jest was “in parentheses,” apparently a rough translation for off-the-record.)

He apologizes about missing a previous interview, saying he had been worn out from a long day of media encounters. “I was exhausted,” he says. “And probably drunk too.”

This time around, accompanied by a pretty young girlfriend who was flying with him to Australia, he sticks to mineral water. “It’s great for jet lag,” he advises.

Apparently peeved about a recent Interview feature that he says misquoted him as bad-mouthing Robert De Niro (“that’s so untrue--he is a hero to me!”), Depardieu is all business. An hour into his interview, he becomes bored and restless, signaling an end to the chat by abruptly heading off to his limousine.

Depardieu may find his publicity labors trying, but it was a series of interviews he did in Australia several years ago that got him his part in “Green Card.”

“I’d been writing a romantic comedy about an Englishman who comes to America and has to get a green card,” explains Peter Weir in a separate interview. “And when it wasn’t going very well, my wife suggested that I use Gerard as the model for the character. So, almost completely on a whim, I wrote the entire movie for him.

“After I got started, Gerard came to Sydney for a film festival. I thought of calling him up, but I was afraid he might say no. So instead, I took a picture of him that ran with an interview he gave in the local paper and kept it on my desk as I wrote.”

Too nervous to simply send Depardieu’s agent the completed script, Weir got on a plane, flew to Paris and spent a weekend with the actor at his country house. Weir says that the two men took long walks in the fields surrounding Depardieu’s home, getting to know each other. The fact that Weir speaks French with as little confidence as Depardieu handles English was hardly an impediment once the creative juices began flowing.

“We had a real rapport from the start,” Weir says. “When we had trouble finding the right words to explain something, we simply pooled our two languages and made them one. We were never embarrassed to use whichever language expressed what we were trying to say.”

Depardieu prefers to work with strong-minded directors who can provide him with rich, provocative material. His favorite remains longtime collaborator Blier, with whom he has made four films, including “Going Places,” “Menage” and “Too Beautiful for You.”

Depardieu was born in a small town in central France that had a nearby U.S. Air Force base. Fascinated by American culture, Depardieu went to see rock ‘n’ roll movies, stole blue jeans from laundry lines and hung out at the local train station, perfecting his James Dean impression.

“When I was young I loved James Dean and Marlon Brando,” he recalls. “But I liked so many American stars--Gary Cooper, Robert Mitchum, Alan Ladd.” He grins mischievously. “Even Victor Mature!”

He insists he was extremely shy as a teen-ager. In fact, he believes his youthful timidity served him well as a performer.

“There have been many great actors who stuttered in real life, but once they were on stage, they were completely relaxed,” he says. “Certain kinds of obstacles can be assets, not just defects. There is something in the art of acting that transforms these difficulties into strengths and beauties.”

Depardieu taps his fork on the table. “If you are only macho, like some actors you see today, you can’t ever be shy. But if you are shy, you can still act macho. I am not afraid to show my feminine side--it’s part of what makes me a man.”

He waves the fork in the air. “Our society wants us to be men with (guts). But the greatest thing you can have as a man is to have the (guts)--and the vulnerability too.”

Talk of success and celebrity bores him. “Who knows what success is anyway,” he says. “I’m not a sportsman, trying to better my record. I try to make good movies, regardless of whether they make money or not. A good flop is better than two ordinary hits anyway.”

But are actors held in high regard in France, at least when compared to other artists? “The most respected artists are writers,” Depardieu concludes after a thoughtful silence. “Then come the composers and musicians. After that, the film directors. The only actors who really matter are the ones who come along and release creative energy.”

Depardieu throws his hands into the air, mimicking a bomb blast. “They are the detonators. They inspire writers to release a blast of creative energy, which can make great movies.”

Depardieu is, of course, too modest to describe himself as such a detonator. But hearing him detail his relationship with Blier, it seems that he relishes just such a role.

“We make movies together , the way Scorsese does with De Niro,” he says. “I don’t like to just take a script and say, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’ Blier and I are so close that he doesn’t even have to explain anymore. We know what each other is thinking.”

Could Depardieu ever reach such instinctive harmony with Weir (who hopes to do another film with him) or an American filmmaker? “I hope so,” he says. “But when it comes to American movies, I have a long way to go, not just because I don’t understand the language, but because I need to understand the spirit of the language.

“But what makes film so beautiful is that it helps you discover so much about different cultures. If you see a Bunuel film, you learn about the Spanish and their problems with God. If you see a French film, you understand we have our problems with sex.”

And what has Depardieu discerned about Hollywood films and their vision of Americans? “Ah,” he says with mock gravity. “You Americans. Your trouble is with guilt.”

Guilt but not sex? “Oh yes, sex too,” he says with a laugh. “But only because it makes you feel so guilty!”