Mathieu Kassovitz on starring in De Gaulle: Résistance and how being Jewish informs his work

Anger seemingly fuels Kassovitz. Right now, he’s infuriated by the French film industry – making films that rarely break out. “We need big budget movies in France. We need to show that we’re competitive,” he says. “Koreans, no one speaks their language either, but they still export them and change cinema. They have ambition.”

Still, Kassovitz concedes, there have been attempts to buck this trend. Following recent lavish adaptations of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, De Gaulle: Résistance is the first of a two-part movie (the second, Liberté, is due next month). It’s one of the most expensive French film projects ever made, with the two movies costing an estimated $80 million (£60 million) combined.

“It’s a war movie, so it cannot be done without money. But if you think about it, it’s $80 million for two movies. Paul [Thomas] Anderson did a guy running around in a robe in Los Angeles for 130.” He’s referring to Anderson’s tale of revolutionaries, One Battle After Another, which starred a robe-wearing Leonardo DiCaprio and won six Oscars, including Best Picture, earlier this year. To say he’s not a fan is an understatement. “130 million dollars? I’m so pissed at One Battle After Another. How can you look at yourself in America? I’m doing an anarchist, revolutionary movie in the world that we’re living in right now. And we have an actor who takes 30 million dollars for basically running around in LA!”

Rant over. As the grandson of Hungarian Holocaust survivors and son of a Jewish refugee father, it is perhaps inevitable that Kassovitz would become drawn to a Second World War project. And not for the first time: his father previously directed the 1999 Holocaust drama Jakob the Liar, in which he took a small role alongside star Robin Williams. He also narrated Apocalypse: The Second World War, a critically acclaimed 2009 six-part French documentary miniseries about the conflict – a project that brought home to him just how present the war remains. “It didn’t happen 200 years ago. We are talking about our grandparents’ generation, not our ancestors’,” he notes.

Thanks to his work on the documentary, Kassovitz was aware of Darlan (“I’m history curious,” he chuckles), although he admits when the director first came to him, he fudged it. “When he asked me to do the part, I said, ‘Yeah, of course, I know the character.’ And then I went on Wikipedia.” While the film also features French Resistance hero Jean Moulin, Kassovitz was most fascinated by De Gaulle, whose wartime efforts – very much against his government’s attempts to appease Germany – remain relatively untouched by cinema.

“Nobody made a movie about Le General de Gaulle and the decisions that he had to make,” he says. Amid a big-budget story that hops between France, England and the crucial battle of Bir Hakeim, in North Africa, he felt that the film shows the very personal side of war. Perhaps leading us all to consider how we might react. “You ask yourself the question: What would I do if I was in his shoes? And that’s what this movie is doing: it’s more of a documentary about who he was.”

Previously married to French actor and costume designer Julie Mauduech,  Kassovitz is a secular Jew who feels strongly about his ethnicity. He says he grew up in a “world of Jewish humour”, and even La Haine – made when he was just 27 – cast the young Vincent Cassel as Vinz, an Ashkenazi Jew. He later worked with Spielberg on Munich, which told of the aftermath of the 1972 Olympics in West Germany when Black September terrorists murdered 11 Israeli Olympic team members. He played a bombmaker who joins Mossad.

He is open about being on set and how the actors – including future 007 actor Daniel Craig – waited in Malta for Spielberg, who wasn’t able to arrive until the beginning of the shoot.

“Daniel was very worried…[what] if he doesn’t like us when we act?’ And I told him, ‘Tell him to go f**k himself. He should have been here.’” In the event, Craig need not have worried. “I talked to Spielberg afterwards afterwards and said. ‘You weren’t there, so were you not scared that we wouldn’t fit?’ He replied, ‘My job is to choose you. Once I choose you, I cannot do anything.’”

It’s not so hard to imagine Kassovitz confronting Spielberg – or anyone else, for that matter. His is a rebellious nature. To this end, he is already sticking it to the industry by supporting the use of AI tools in cinema, developing an almost entirely AI-enabled film based on The Beast is Dead!, a 1940s wartime graphic novel by Edmond-François Calvo. An allegory in the Animal Farm mould, it depicts French rabbits against Nazi wolves, “it’s a story of two little rabbits that have to travel the whole forest of Europe to free their family,” he explains.

For him, AI is a far greater tool for world-building than the industry-standard visual effects that have been used to create special effects. “I don’t like CGI [Computer Generated Imagery].That’s why I haven’t made the movie in 15 years… I don’t want to get involved with those special effects – the way it was made for the past 30 years. Unless you put a huge amount of money to make it look really good, the rest doesn’t look that good. And we get used to that. What AI will do is to level the quality of everything, put everybody on the same level.”

Once a rebel, always a rebel.

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De Gaulle: Résistance is in cinemas on August 28.  De Gaulle: Part 2 – Liberté is released on September 18