Jean Reno is a talented linguist. He's fluent in French, Spanish, Italian and English and he also speaks a language of his own. Renoise is a lively blend of Franglais, goggle-eyed gesticulations and guttural noises. "Oooh, in the mind, urrr," he says clutching his head. "Booourr," he exclaims, puffing up his chest. "Pfffssst," comes with a dismissive slice of the hand; "ppough, ppough," with a mimed pistol shot. And his final comment is prefaced with a re-enactment of scaling a wall and falling backwards with an imaginary rifle slung across his shoulders. It all makes perfect sense.
His expressiveness is far from the fastidious calm of the assassin he played in Leon, the film that brought Reno fame outside France 13 years ago. Since then, the 58-year-old has become Hollywood's favorite Frenchman or, in Renoise, a "damn shit frog." He has been the glowering European presence (which in Hollywood usually means either shifty or morally compromised) in a succession of blockbusters from Mission: Impossible to Godzilla and The Da Vinci Code. His latest role is at the heart of another big-budget American action movie, Flyboys, where Reno plays the straight-backed, cane-twirling French commander of a squadron of American pilots who volunteer to fight the Germans in the World War I.
Sitting in his office on an elegant street off the Champs Elysees, Reno has another battle on his mind. Every few moments he lifts his eyes — his characteristic dark bags beneath almost erased by tan and good health — to a large TV bringing live news of the French presidential election.
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The actor is taking a close personal interest because Nicolas Sarkozy, who duly won, was best man at Reno's wedding to his third wife, Zofia Borucka, last summer. The two men have been "very" good friends since meeting when they were neighbors for 10 years. They bonded while taking their dogs for evening walks and, says Reno slightly lugubriously, chatting about his failing marriage and Sarkozy's political struggles. "I was divorcing and he was in trouble with the politics. My ex-wife had a dog and we were with the two dogs, every night, going, 'How are you?' Not too much politics, because I'm not a politician. Just, 'How are you?' And that's the best way to become a good friend. Then you speak about women, life, divorce, the kids, and wine — avoiding politics. Because a politician is a cold-blooded animal." Do you think? "Yeah," he laughs. Completely different to an actor.
Reno shares with Sarkozy a great enthusiasm for most things Anglo-Saxon (Reno's current wife was born in London), and he hopes his friend can transform France. "He's kind of Tony Blair," he says. "He had a difficult road. Him and Chirac, they fought. Wow. Ppough, ppough." He mimes a shoot-out which, as you would expect from someone who has cornered the assassin-secret agent market, is rather realistic.
How will Sarkozy change France? "Less socialism. He will be good for the economy, because we have to work a little bit more. I think we are the only country where we have a 35-hour working week, that famous law, and it is forbidden to work more." He chuckles. "C'est incroyable. It's unbelievable. So he will change the taxes and we will be more involved in Europe. Yes, we have to be."
Reno may appear the archetypal Frenchman to British or American audiences but his background is far more complex. He was born in Morocco to Spanish parents and was raised in the multicultural port of Casablanca. In 1968, he left to enlist in the French army because national service was mandatory to obtain French citizenship. After becoming a drama student in Paris and doing theater for a decade, he hooked up for the first time with the director Luc Besson in 1981, going on to work on Subway, The Big Blue, Nikita and Leon, in which Reno made his name. In 1993, his comic turn in Jean-Marie Poire's smash-hit Les Visiteurs cemented his A-list status in France.
Reno's globetrotting — he tends to alternate between Hollywood and French films and is about to start work on a comedy in France — has left him suspicious of nationalistic feeling in France. "Because I was born in Casablanca and my parents were from the south of Spain, I do not have a big central root in France. I feel French but in a few ways, not at all French." He is happy learning new languages or living in foreign countries. "I don't think you lose culture because you act different cultures. Voila. I don't feel like I have to be nationalistic French because I'm afraid of losing whatever. No, no, no, no. And also I don't think we are the best." He admires many French people for their pride in their country but that, he says, is not nationalism. "They are proud because the water we have," he raises his glass of mineral water and thumps it down on the table, "is a good water; the wine we have is a good wine. Being proud and being nationalistic are, for me, completely different things."
Similarly, Reno has no time for those French film buffs who are scathingly dismissive of Hollywood. He is happy to have his name attached to critically mauled productions such as Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code and Flyboys — which was fairly roundly panned in the US on its release last year — because he respects the drive and the self-made status of many of his Hollywood colleagues. "They have something different. It is difficult to do a movie over there. For example, Ron Howard. Merde! He was like that," he holds his hand 50cm from the floor, "when he started. He came from the country and his father was a countryman. One day his father saw his house (in Hollywood) and," Reno goes goggle-eyed with astonishment, "went, 'Man, you made money!' Those people are real somehow. They are from Hollywood but they are real. Tom Hanks is a bankable actor, a huge, huge actor, and a real guy."
So Reno seems the ideal candidate to play a French captain teaching young Americans how to handle their perilous biplanes in Flyboys, which claims to be based on the real-life Lafayette Escadrille, a French air squadron commanded by Georges Thenault that was mainly composed of American volunteers. The film's numerous cliches won't surprise but, through Reno and his young charges, Flyboys does show America and France working together in — gasp — an atmosphere of mutual respect.
Reno prefers not to see the film as a comment on Franco-American relations but as a tale of youth and folly. "I think those Americans who came to fight didn't know what was happening in Europe. They were escaping from family situations or whatever. They had no history in America in common with Europe. So I don't think they had a relationship with England or Germany or France. It was a relationship between youth and trying to avoid what you have done wrong when you are young. Germany, communism, pfffssst! They were not in their minds. After, maybe: you realize you have grown up and taken part in history."
He agrees, however, that the film's subject matter is unusual given the current frostiness over the war in Iraq. Reno says he avoided talking about global politics with American friends after September 11. "It was tough," he says. "You see what you want to see inside the news. The other day I was watching the news and do you know that the French have been fighting in Afghanistan since the beginning of the war there? You are not going to say that to the Americans today because it does not go with the (prevailing) mood. The mood is, 'Those damn shit froggies do not agree with the Iraq war.' That was Chirac's opinion — he said it was not a good idea to go to Iraq. That's all."
Reno is adamant that his own military experience could not be brought to bear on Flyboys, where Thenault is indulgent of his charges "because he knows they are going to die." Pilots' life-expectancy was three to six weeks. His portrayal of Thenault "is a bit of romanticism. Blue uniform, moustache. Bon. It is part of the ancient world. Most of the pilots in England and France were nobles so they had that kind of chivalry."
He met with no such indulgence during his national service in the hands of veteran captains who had served in Vietnam and Algeria. "They were cold. Very cold. Oui. I had two suicides in my group of young people. They jumped out of the window. A man broke his whole skeleton because you had to climb up a wall as an exercise." Reno mimes clambering up a wall and explains that they had rifles slung across their shoulders so on this occasion the rifle broke the soldier's back when he fell. "So I am not a fan of military people. I am not a fan of uniforms. All uniforms. Non." He plays military people but "It's not me. Of course, it is my work. I understand. I try."
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