Rie Rasmussen Interview, Angel-A

Posted by: Sheila Roberts

MoviesOnline caught up with Rie Rasmussen at the Los Angeles press day to promote her new film, “Angel-A,” written, directed and produced by Luc Besson (“The Professional,” “La Femme Nikita,” “The Big Blue”). The Danish born Rasmussen is a writer, director, artist, photographer, actress and model. Her first short film as writer/director, “Thinning the Herd,” was an official selection of the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. She made her acting debut in Brian DePalma’s “Femme Fatale.” “Angel-A” is Rasmussen’s first lead role. She stars opposite Jamel Debbouze (“Amelie”), one of France’s leading comedic actors who delivers a surprising turn in this dramatic role.

In “Angel-A,” a man meets a woman in Paris. Down-on-his-luck petty criminal Andre (Jamel Debbouze) has reached the end of his rope. Irreversibly in debt to a local gangster, with no one to turn to, his only solution is to plunge himself into the Seine. Just as he is perched to do so, a fellow bridge-jumper beats him to the water. Diving in, he saves Angela (Rie Rasmussen), a beautiful, statuesque and mysterious woman. As they pull themselves out the water, the two form a bond and venture into the streets of Paris determined to get Andre out of the hole he has found himself in. As Andre will find out, not all debts are financial, and sometimes the solutions to life’s problems are found in the unlikeliest of places. Is Angela simply repaying Andre for his kindness, or are there other forces at work beyond his comprehension?

Besson explains, “In Rie, I found a rare pearl. I have never met a woman like her, in love with everything, curious about everything, and so gifted – she paints, draws, takes photos and directs. Wherever she goes, she spreads happiness and smiles. Her enthusiasm was a real boost for me and made me want to shoot a film again. Being an actress is, for her, just another string to her bow. In one month, this Danish-American was speaking French and knew her lines backwards. Assiduous, upright and as strong as an oak, she entranced the whole shoot with her smile, good humor, kindness and loyalty.

Rasmussen holds her director in equally high esteem, “Frame by frame, shot by shot! He’s one of my favorite directors, up there with Orson Welles, John Huston, Howard Hawkes, Sam Peckinpah, Bob Fosse and Brian de Palma. The Big Blue was one of the first films I bought on video. I first saw it in Denmark and my whole family was crazy about it. I also fell in love with Nikita, especially the lighting.”

Here’s what the multi-talented Rie had to tell us about her latest film, “Angel-A”:

MoviesOnline: How well did you speak French before the film? You were so good that I thought you were French.

RIE RASMUSSEN: I’m just good like that. [Laughs] Um, no that was sarcasm. I know you can't detect that on tape recorders. I didn't speak French before. No, not at all. I knew merci beaucoup with a really bad accent, but he gave me the script in English and I was working with Europa, his company at the time, as a writer/director. I'd done my first short film with them and I was working on my feature film script. He gave me this script in English and it was a really fantastic script about love and acceptance of yourself and therefore how you can accept and love others. I saw the whole beautiful commentary on life in it, and I was very, very, very flattered when he said would you please be the actress for me. That one I hadn't really expected.

MoviesOnline: Did you know that the film would be in French?

RIE RASMUSSEN: No, but then once I said yeah, every part of me--the film lover, the film fan, the Besson film, the writer, the director, the actor--every part of me exploded. I was so happy. I said ‘yes, of course I'll commit myself.’ He said ‘okay, good because now it's in French.’ ‘I guess I'm moving to Paris tomorrow?’ and he said ‘yes’ and I did.

MoviesOnline: Don't you have to be kind of multilingual as a model?

RIE RASMUSSEN: As a model, no, you just have to be really dumb and it works out really well. [Laughs]

MoviesOnline: Even with all the traveling and the different people you work with?

RIE RASMUSSEN: No, you know the dumber you are as a model, the better you are off because you're treated so, and the people before you have laid the ground work for the fact that if you're dumb, everybody's going to love you. If you have something to say you might as well walk out because it's never going to happen. I don't know if we have my book in here but there a nice little quote that's been published before because I think people liked it. I said, ‘Photographers who wished they were directors, stylists who wanted to be writers and designers who are failed actors, these are a few of the many types of people I've inadvertently pissed off in fashion by voicing my creative opinion.

Although it was not my intention to intimidate, instead of giving an apology, I'd like to say f*ck you. It was amazing in spite of your insecurities xo xo Rie.’ That’s how I feel. They’re insecure babies who do something in a medium that's extremely easy to handle, and I think we've all had a camera where we know that it's not too difficult. We've all put clothes on in the morning and styled ourselves. We know it's not too difficult to have an opinion. But you could make it out like you're having brain surgery, that you’re doing brain surgery. They're just frustrated people. But as a writer, it was an extreme experience to be part of.

MoviesOnline: [joking] Of course filmmakers are totally secure and have complete control of everything?

RIE RASMUSSEN: Of course. [Laughs] No, but I do feel if you're a writer/director, you have a certain introspective on life and you're generally more sensitive to humanities. If you start taking yourself too seriously, you're going to fail. I think we've all been proven that the second we think we're important, what we write is going to be sh*t, what we put out in images is going to suck, and we get a big smack in the face, and we're back in the humble seat, and you're going to make something good again.

MoviesOnline: What was the hardest part about making this film?

RIE RASMUSSEN: Learning French. I think if we're going to be honest and you obviously know the movie industry and I think if you've all told a lie, acting may not be that difficult. It's playtime. We’ve all been kids. We've all done it. We've all done it for hours at a time. We’ve all been convincing doing it unless we have a tendency to blush. I don't take it as so difficult. I feel sometimes that Oscars are overrated for actors because you're saying something that somebody great like Paul Schrader or Robert Towne wrote, and you're being directed how to say it, and you're being stylized and lit while you're saying it, and all of sudden you get an Oscar and then I keep going ‘for what?’ But no, this is not the case for everybody of course. There are great, great actors out there, but I do think if you have a great actor, it goes hand in hand with a great director. You had Humphrey Bogart and John Huston, Marlon Brando and Elia Kazan, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese. Films are a director's medium.

MoviesOnline: After starring in this movie, do you feel your career may go off on the acting path vs. directing?

RIE RASMUSSEN: God, I hope not. No, I really have fun acting. I'm being too cynical. I have fun acting and I think we all would. It’s real easy. You walk on set -- I mean generally, not when you have to learn another language, it's pretty hard -- but you walk on set, you're there for 6 or 7 weeks, you do your thing, you have fun, you're charming and silly, you don't have to put the equipment in the morning and take it out at night, and travel and change locations and set it all up.

You don’t have 2 months or 4 months of pre-production. You don't have the anguish of writing it and being turned down everywhere you go or the anguish of trying to find the money. You don't have the anguish of having to go through post-production and running out of money and nobody wanting your film after and getting the wrong distribution channels and not being able to be in the right screen in the theater and getting a bad billboard. You're completely exonerated from any kind of obligations in life. So we all want to be actors, of course. It's easy.

MoviesOnline: This film has been well received wherever it's gone. Has being in it helped you get financing for your own projects?

RIE RASMUSSEN: Yes, it definitely has. It's aided me immensely. Of course, Luc Besson has aided me immensely. I’m a huge fan of his. He's a master for me, especially because he's so naive in his approach to filmmaking and innocent. This is the second film about suicide, maybe the third, but he made a film about suicide that brings a smile to everybody's lips. When you talk about The Big Blue, everybody smiles, but it's about a guy who doesn't fit into the world and he'd rather die than live with the rest of us.

But it's a movie that makes us feel good, and I think you can only do that if you're almost innocent. He doesn't feed on the film industry. He's hardly seen any movies. I can't reference anything with him. I’m much more the Quentin Tarantino school of filmmakers. I've seen everything, I eat it all, I analyze it and turn it upside down and love it, where it's completely not the case with Luc. He'd never seen It's a Wonderful Life. A friend showed it to him after Angel-A because he'd never seen the movie.

MoviesOnline: What was your relationship like with your co-star, Jamel Debbouze? You guys play off each other in a lot of different ways over the course of the film. What was it like working with him?

RIE RASMUSSEN: Jamel is a huge star in France and Morocco. I had no idea who he was, so that was kind of brilliant because I had no idea. I hadn't seen Amélie at the time either by the way, but he's a great, great dramatic actor but he just doesn't know it. It was a really scary challenge for him because I don't think he really wanted to but he wanted to work with Besson. It's a big deal for him and how those two collided--his image which is very like hip hop chic in France and North Africa to this kind of character he's playing here and then Luc kind of directing him is honestly that made him ....you know how he has to be lost in the film, he's kind of lost the whole time, like fantastically lost and you just want to help him?

That charm that he gets through there, he was lost in the production because it was so foreign to anything he's ever done. Normally, he writes his own dialogue because he's a standup comedian. He kind of comes on the day and wings it, a little high (she makes an inhaling sound), but it’s all good, and here you know, it's like we work from 6 to 10 in the morning, everybody's prepared. I had to know my lines by heart because it was another language. We do 17 pages at a time in the cafe scene. We just stop, change magazine and you cry. You have to cry right there, right then and the scene moves on. We'd do it in one. Nine pages we'd do it in one no matter. There was no ‘okay, stop and change the angle.’ It was theater basically.

MoviesOnline: Did you do any ad-libbing in this?

RIE RASMUSSEN: No ad-libbing. Actually the thing is if you listen to it in French, it's a ping-pong game between us. Basically I might in one interpretation -- because this is basically an adult fairy tale -- in one interpretation I might be the part of his soul that lets him love himself. I basically arrive at the point where's there's no return for Jamel and he could have, in one interpretation of it, invented me to save himself. I could just be the part of him that says, ‘Hey, you're wonderful, relax’ -- the part that allows him to accept who he is.

It's basically if we accept who we are with all the mistakes and all the bad things that we've done, and we know we've done things that we'd rather not put a light on, but if we accept who we are with those, maybe it's easier to accept our neighbor with their faults, too. But if we ignore that we have faults and then we do things wrong, we're never going to accept somebody else because everybody's going to have faults. So that's basically the message of the film and as for the charisma, I'm glad that it worked. [Laughs]

MoviesOnline: The height difference is one of the things that really stands out in the film.

RIE RASMUSSEN: [Laughs] Yeah, he was looking for that. Luc makes of it in his brilliant master Luc Besson shots you know where the comedy is not in the words. The comedy is in that. It's fantastic. Just as in the black and white. It's all in contrast. He's introverted and little and fully clothed and layered.

MoviesOnline: In that first scene, you're even standing on something and you looked so much taller. How tall is he and how tall are you?

RIE RASMUSSEN: I'm not that tall especially for Danish people, but I'm 5-10 1/2 and he’s, I don't know, he's very, very small. [Laughs] He's a surprisingly small person. He doesn't have his left arm I think it is. There’s no motor function. He lost it when he was 15 in an accident with a train. He always has his hand in his pocket if you look. I think it's stunted his growth. He's a very, very petite man.

MoviesOnline: Have you stayed friends since this movie was made in 2005?

RIE RASMUSSEN: I wouldn't even say we were friends while we shot it. We were on set charisma amazing and I had a great time playing on set but we're extremely different in real life. I come from the other side of the camera and he's definitely a star. It's just a different sensibility.

MoviesOnline: He had an ego? Is that what you're saying?

RIE RASMUSSEN: I'm saying he's a star and stars are a different thing. It's when people get used to being a star and they're being treated like a star. They become something else and I think just because I worked on the other side for so long, I have an immense respect for what it takes to make a film and be part of it and that's also what I strive for. Certain people strive for that lifestyle of being a star and that's what they want. It's a different life.

MoviesOnline: Did you ever have crowds watching him or Luc while you were filming in Paris?

RIE RASMUSSEN: [Laughs] This was brilliant. August, nobody's in Paris. They're all in the south of France. So first, it was a really genius thing to shoot in August. Second, nobody in Paris wakes up before 10:00 and no store opens before 10. They have a really good kind sensibility with this so the only people we'd run into were Japanese tourists. They know who Luc Besson is, but most of them didn't recognize him, and they don't know who Jamel is, so we had no crowds.

If there was about to be a crowd, we had an amazing decoy which was The Da Vinci Code was shooting in Paris at that time, so the people in the morning from the set would call the certain little part of journalists that still were in town working....The Da Vinci Code is going to be shooting there and we'd send them all somewhere else and we'd shoot here. It was really well organized. Paris is Luc Besson's city. He rocks that place. He's got it down to a T. The man's been a director for so long and a producer that we shot for 4 hours every day and that was it.

MoviesOnline: What did you learn from Luc Besson that you would take back to your work?

RIE RASMUSSEN: I'll say mainly what I learned from Besson was when I was a little girl and I watched The Big Blue and then when I was 12 or 13 and I watched La Femme Nikita. That's when he was instrumental in making me the filmmaker I am today or the person that I am today. Watching him on set was like, oh of course. He's been there since he was 17, he's done every job: 3rd assistant, 2nd assistant, 1st assistant, grip, coffee getter, go to sleep on the set, watch the camera, he's done everything. Maybe he knows how to do everybody's job better than them basically. He just delegates with swift authority.

MoviesOnline: Where are you living now?

RIE RASMUSSEN: New York City. I was 15 when I left Denmark to go to New York City, but nobody was making movies.

MoviesOnline: You lived in New York in your teen years then Southern California?

RIE RASMUSSEN: Well, this was the thing. I arrived in New York when I was 15 and no matter how responsible you are at 15, and I was very responsible for my own actions and taking the consequences, but still it was New York City which is difficult, it's tempting. [Laughs] There was no filmmaking going on at the time either because of bad, bad union laws in New York. It was impossible to work, so I went to California and I ended up in Huntington Beach.

MoviesOnline: Were you a Surfer girl?

RIE RASMUSSEN: One thing led to another and the only thing I was making was high-eight skateboard videos. People setting themselves on fire and stuff like this so it was a strange....well, I guess Spike Jones came from that [laughs], but not quite as inventive as his. It was learning.

MoviesOnline: Were you a smoker before doing the movie?

RIE RASMUSSEN: No, no and I'm not. It's a horrible, horrible filthy habit and you can see your immune system breaks down, your skin dries out and it's horrible for you.

MoviesOnline: Would you do another French film?

RIE RASMUSSEN: There’s no reason. I’ve worked with Mr. Besson. I did it. [Laughs] If I were to die today, I’d die happy. I’m so proud of doing this film that everything that is to come will be like a cherry on the cake! Angel-A is like no other movie. You’re in for a big surprise.

“Angel-A” opens in theaters on May 25th.