French ‘Visitors’ Star Has a Mission in the U.S.

“I’m not a real comedian,” admits Jean Reno, whose straight-man incarnation of a hapless but dignified medieval knight stranded in 1992 helped make the slapstick comedy “The Visitors” France’s highest-grossing movie ever. “Comedians are guys with tons of energy. They’re animals.”

There is indeed something bestial about the movie’s screenwriter, Christian Clavier, who also plays the knight’s braying, snorting and caterwauling sidekick, and it is a quality Reno admires, but from afar.

“All actors should work with comedians,” he says gravely. “You can learn a tremendous amount. Making people laugh is the most difficult thing in the world.”

But if Reno (pronounced like the car manufacturer Renault) lacks his collaborator’s screwball looseness, he does have a knack for looking simultaneously mystified and majestic as the knight-errant Godefroy on a quest to find his way back to the Middle Ages, and the combination is irresistibly funny.

In the movie, Godefroy, clad in chain mail and tunic, faces down a squawking telephone as a dog might warily approach an object that might or might not be animate and dangerous, a vacuum cleaner, say. Or a porcupine.

Now, sitting firmly in a late 20th century hotel room dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, Reno once again fixes a suspicious gaze on the phone, transforming it instantly into something impenetrably occult.

“In reality, they’d go crazy,” he reflects, referring to medieval time-travelers. “One car horn, and they’d just go nuts.”

“The Visitors” plays both on the conceit of finding the familiar utterly foreign and on the physical dissimilarities between Reno and Clavier--the squire tall and straight-backed with a long face and a rumbling voice, the vassal stumpy, stooped and nasal--and the film’s popularity in France has made them a highly visible pair.

“If we ever go out to eat together, it’s impossible,” Reno says with the satisfied tone of someone who enjoys the inconveniences of fame.

As he describes his restored farmhouse in Provence and waxes lyrical about his ancient olive trees, it is clear that Reno can identify with Godefroy. “Before he was a lord; now he’s a speck of dirt,” he says of his character, perhaps also implying that it can be unnerving for a star to find himself in a city where, for now, he is still anonymous.

He is working to change that. With the subtitled U.S. release of “The Visitors” last week coming on the heels of “Mission: Impossible,” in which he makes a short but ferocious appearance, Reno is trying to raise his profile in the United States.

“In France, if you have four reasonable scripts to choose from, that’s already great. In America, you can do ‘Dances With Wolves’ in January, ‘Mission: Impossible’ in March and ‘Schindler’s List’ in June. And they pay you to do it!”

But although he maintains an apartment in Los Angeles, a city he does not particularly like, Reno has no plans to abandon French films for Hollywood. “I’ve seen too many French actors serving pizzas there,” he says. At 47, “you have to dream, but your dream can’t be too far from reality. You’re not going to replace Kevin Costner.”

Reno learned while he was still a student that he was no romantic lead, and the fact caused him some despair. “For me, a romantic lead was someone who works when he’s very young.” He had to wait, and while he waited, he worried and philosophized. “An actor is like a building,” he states. “The deeper his foundations, the higher he can go.”

Today, Reno can afford to be fastidious about the roles he picks, and he ticks off the things he won’t do: no Nazis, no rapists, no vampires. “I won’t do anything that offends my moral sense,” he says. He will play sex scenes under duress but would rather not. “I prefer making love with gestures, rather than taking my clothes off and getting into bed with a woman,” he says. “I’d hate to have my children see that.”

Rather than do whatever it takes to make it in Hollywood, Reno would prefer to parlay his steadily growing stature into more support for the films he’d like to make back home. “If, because I’m sort of well known, I can facilitate things for interesting directors, then I’m happy.”

Among the French directors to whom he owes allegiance is Luc Besson, whose 1987 film “The Big Blue” made Reno a celebrity in France and with whom he has worked several times since. It was Besson who advised him to take advantage of his natural burliness, to begin working out and buffing his virile image. “Before Luc, I used to play on the stage.” Now, he’s more often a tough guy.

It seems only right that his bid to make it big in the United States should come, not in one of those airy, meditative works of cinema that most often represent France in American art houses, but in a movie full of good old American-style bawdiness and cartoonish violence.

As he recounts his formative movie experiences, he brushes past the New Wave figures American cinephiles revere, like Louis Malle and Francois Truffaut, instead lingering devoutly on the names Marlon Brando, James Dean, Kirk Douglas and John Wayne.

“You go into this profession because you have a dream,” he says, explaining why he hates to see his own movies (he has yet to see “Mission: Impossible”). “You’re in a seat in a movie theater and those guys are up there on the screen, and you dream. Then one day, you’re in a seat in a movie theater and it’s you up there on the screen. And it’s not a dream anymore.”