Actor Guillaume Canet Talks Partner Marion Cotillard, Co-Star Catherine Deneuve, Paragliding and Horse Jumping

Guillaume Canet | Paula Schwartz Photo
Guillaume Canet | Paula Schwartz Photo

Writer-director-actor Guillaume Canet is a big star in France and a major heartthrob, according to Imdb.com. Both are undeniably true. I sat next to the charismatic and charming actor at an intimate lunch recently at the Park Hyatt Hotel hosted by Jaeqer-LeCoultre to celebrate the actor’s two films included in the Rendez-Vous With French Cinema film festival, a co-presentation of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Unifrance Films. Only Catherine Deneuve bested Canet with three movies in the film festival.

Cold and jetlagged – Canet had arrived in Manhattan from Paris only the night before – his dizzying schedule included luncheons, receptions, panels and screenings. In both of his films – “In the Name of My Daughter” and “Next Time I’ll Aim for the Heart” – based on true stories that took place in the 1970’s, he plays dead-eyed, psychopathic killers.

During the two-hour lunch, the “Speak to No One” director charmed and entertained guests, mainly journalists, with stories about Catherine Deneuve, with whom he co-stars in “In the Name of My Daughter,” his adventures riding horses and paragliding, and his many loving references to his famous partner, Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard, with whom he has a young son.

Complaining slightly of the cold, he kept his overcoat on and stuck to sparkling water. Boyishly handsome at 41, his curly hair sprinkled with grey, Canet is an entertaining raconteur and has the actor’s gift of making you feel like you are the only one in the room with him. He’s particularly good at impressions and mimicking accents. Once in a while, especially when a remark made him laugh, he pulled out his cellphone and said he had to text Marion.

Catherine Deneuve co-stars with Canet in “In the Name of My Daughter,” so naturally there were questions about what it was like working with the iconic actress. Deneuve plays a haughty casino owner and eventually grieving mother, who spends three decades seeking justice for the daughter presumably murdered by Canet’s a character, a sleazy lawyer with whom she had an affair.

“I was petrified,” he told me of working with Deneuve. “I never had this with anyone, and I worked with some really famous actors and actresses. When I arrived in front of Catherine, who started the scene, my text was gone, no memories, nothing! I apologized, ‘I’m so sorry,’ I was laughing, ‘I’m sorry but you impress me maybe,’” he told her. “I was seeing all her movies flashing before my eyes.”

Deneuve was gracious and calmed her co-star by saying, “Don’t worry, tomorrow it will be me.” The next day she had scenes with lengthy dialogue and text, and it was her turn to flub her lines.

In all three of her films in the festival, Deneuve puffs so many cigarettes I got chest pains just watching her. According to Canet, the cigarette smoking also takes place off screen.

“She’s always smoking,” he told me. “One day we were in a restaurant and a waiter came to her, and she had a cigarette, and he said, ‘Ms. Deneuve, I’m so sorry you’re not allowed to smoke in here.’ She just looked at the guy, gave him this nice smile, said thank you very much, that’s nice to tell me, and kept smoking.”

Then the conversation turned to Canet’s many passions as a sportsman. He could be a character out of an action film. The actor competes in horse jumping competitions and paraglides over open fields half a mile into the air.

When he was 18, Canet was an equestrian and show jumping enthusiast, but quit the sport a year later after a bad accident. Three years ago he made a movie called “Jalloup,” in which he plays a famous Olympic equestrian, and he had to train and ride again. “I loved it,” he said. Now he competes regularly and only three days earlier placed well in a horse-jumping event in Spain. The paparazzi often run photos of his famous actress partner cheering him on during show jumping competitions.

Love of the sport saved Canet from his workaholic tendencies and the insular world of filmmaking, he told us. “I met some other people, some other stories, some other life, and it just feeds you as an actor, as a writer, as a director, not seeing always the same people, the same world, ’cause it’s such a small world.”

Paragliding, an unusual sport probably not sanctioned by the producers or insurers of his movies, relaxes him. He told us his paraglider, a portable, foot-launched contraption that has an engine in back, fits into a suitcase and takes only 20 minutes to assemble.

“When I get too nervous or too difficult to live with, Marion says, ‘Please take off!’ ‘Cause when I land, it’s like all the problems are resolved. It takes me distant from everything.”

He made the sounds of a revving engine and described his first time in the air. “I was so nervous because that was my first takeoff and it’s weird because you never take off with anybody else. The first time you take off, it’s alone because there’s only one seat,” he told me.

“If you have a problem with the engine, you just glide and just hope you can glide over where you are.” His first trip he pulled a lever too hard and dislocated his thumb. “I was like, we’ll see to that later. It’s the second problem. First I’m going to try to land.”

Someone asked if he wears a helmet.

“There is no need to wear a helmet,” he told us. “If you crash having a helmet or not, it won’t change anything.”

Occasionally, this is how he arrives on set, although he never tells the director or crew, who occasionally spot an unusual vision of someone descending from the air. Then there are the chunky shoes paragliders must wear, which Canet often tries to pass off as hiking boots.

Another sport is at the center of “Icon,” a film the actor just completed about shyster biker Lance Armstrong. Directed by Stephen Frears, “Icon” stars Ben Foster as the titular character. Guillaume plays Michele Ferrari, the Italian physician and coach banned from the sport for drug violations in 2012. The film may be finished in time for Cannes or Venice. Canet praised Foster’s performance.

“He was waking up every morning at 3 to train, cycling every morning, and for weeks when he was shooting those films where he has cancer, he had to lose so much weight and so he was like training, not eating anything, and he was exhausted, exhausted, because when you don’t eat and you work and you train it’s terrible. Ben did a great job.”

Asked what it was like to play the flamboyant and disgraced Italian doctor, Canet put on a heavy Italian accent and made exaggerated hand gestures and parroted the notorious statement that cost the doctor his coaching career, “EPO is not dangerous, it’s the abuse that is. It’s also dangerous to drink 10 liters of orange juice,” he joked.

“I love that character. He’s always smiling and pretending everything’s cool,” Canet said, adding with a laugh, “He didn’t want to meet with me. I don’t know why.”

The actor said he doesn’t know what inspired Frears to cast him since there is no physical likeness. Frears told the actor, “I want you to change your face.’ I have a really fake bald head, grey. I lost a lot of weight, and I had to play this character with a lot of color, very cynical, very theatrical.”

The actor took out his cellphone and showed me a picture of him as Ferrari, unrecognizable with a stringy grey wig and ugly glasses.

What did Marion think of this startling physical transformation?

“She just laughed!” he smiled.

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