Danish multi-hyphenate Rie Rasmussen (actress/writer/director) plays the lead role in Luc Besson's Angel-A, a romantic tale involving a down-on-his-luck man (Jamel Debbouze) who saves a beautiful woman (Rasmussen) from committing suicide and in turn changes his own destiny.
Signing on to Angel-A: Rasmussen had to learn enough about the French language to be able to carry off the role. “I didn't speak French before, no not 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 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.”
And after she fell in love with the script, that’s when she found out it would be in French. “Then I 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.”
Acting Versus Directing: Starring in Angel-A hasn’t changed Rasmussen’s mind about the direction she’s going to go in the film industry. Asked if she’d consider pursuing acting over directing, Rasmussen was quick to respond, “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.”
On Working with Jamel Debbouze: “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. 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 Luc kind of directing him 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. He was so foreign for 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.”
Filming Throughout Paris: Rasmussen said their timing was actually perfect and they weren’t hounded by crowds or fans of Luc Besson. “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 was 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 so they don't know who...they know who Luc Besson is, but most of them didn't recognize him. 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 DaVinci Code was shooting in Paris at that time. The people in the morning from the set would call the certain little part of journalists that still were in town working, ‘The DaVinci 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 four hours every day and that was it.”
Angel-A Helped Open Doors: The critical success of Angel-A has helped Rasmussen with her other projects. “It's aided me immensely,” said Rasmussen. “Of course, Luc Besson 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 2nd film about suicide maybe the 3rd, but he made a film about suicide that brings a smile to everybody's lips.
…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. 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, 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.”
