Mathieu Kassovitz (born 3 August 1967) is a French actor, film director, film producer and screenwriter. He has won three César Awards: Most Promising Actor for See How They Fall (1994), and Best Film and Best Editing for La Haine (1995). He also received Best Director and Best Writing nominations.

Early life

He is the son of Peter Kassovitz, a film producer, director and writer, and Chantal Rémy, a film editor. His mother is a French Catholic, while his father is a Hungarian Jew who fled during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Mathieu has described himself as "not Jewish but I was brought up in a world of Jewish humor".

Career

Filmmaker

As a filmmaker, Kassovitz has made several artistic and commercial successes. He wrote and directed La Haine (Hate, 1995), a film dealing with themes around class, race, violence, and police brutality. The film won the César Award for Best Film and netted Kassovitz the Best Director prize at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. He later directed The Crimson Rivers (2000), a police detective thriller starring Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel, another massive commercial success in France, and Gothika (2003), a fantasy thriller (considered by some to be a commercial failure, although it grossed over three times its roughly $40 million budget), with Halle Berry, Robert Downey Jr., and Penélope Cruz. He used the money he made from Gothika to develop a far more personal project Babylon Babies, the adaptation of one of Maurice G. Dantec's books, which eventually would become Babylon A.D.. Kassovitz established the film production firm MNP Entreprise in 2000 "to develop and produce feature films by Kassovitz and to represent him as a director and actor." MNP Entreprise is responsible for the co-productions of a number of films including Avida (2006) in which Kassovitz acted and Babylon A.D. which he directed. Kassovitz purchased the film rights for the novel Johnny chien méchant by Congolese writer Emmanuel Dongala. The film adaptation titled Johnny Mad Dog, written and directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival where it was screened within the Un Certain Regard section. In 2011, he starred in and directed Rebellion, a war film based on a true story of French commandos who clashed with tribes in New Caledonia, the Melanesian territory of France. His future project science fiction film MNP is named after Mir Space Station, whose writing in Cyrillic letters (Мир) look like the letters MNP, and also the production company.

Actor

Kassovitz is most famous outside France for his acting role as Nino Quincampoix in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film Amélie. He also had small roles in La Haine (which he also directed), Birthday Girl, and The Fifth Element. He played leading roles in A Self-Made Hero (1996) by Jacques Audiard and in Amen. (2003) by Costa-Gavras. Kassovitz is also recognizable for playing a conflicted Belgian explosives expert in Steven Spielberg's 2005 film Munich, alongside Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, and Geoffrey Rush. Kassovitz was a jury member for the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. Since 2015, Kassovitz has been starring in the acclaimed espionage thriller series The Bureau, broadcast in France on Canal+ and made available around the world on Amazon Prime Video. So far five seasons have been screened.

Personal life

Kassovitz was married to French actress Julie Mauduech, whom he directed and acted alongside in his 1993 film Métisse (Café au lait, English title) and also made a brief appearance in La Haine (during the scene in the Parisian art gallery). In 2009, Kassovitz won with a Tesla Roadster the Rallye Monte Carlo des Véhicules à Énergie Alternative (starting event of the FIA Alternative Energies Cup) in the category reserved to electric vehicles. Kassovitz is also known for his outspokenness, frequently making controversial comments on socio-political issues. Kassovitz was an ardent critic of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, whom he described in his blog as having "ideas that not only reveal his inexperience of politics and human relations, but which also illuminate the purely demagogical and egocentric aspects of a puny, would-be Napoleon." In a 2012 interview, he labeled the outgoing Sarkozy administration as "horrible". On 3 September 2023, while engaged in a training course at the Autodrome de Linas-Montlhéry, Kassovitz was involved in a "serious" motorcycle accident that caused head trauma and a fractured pelvis.

Filmography

Short film

Producer

Feature film

Acting roles

Television

Acting roles

Awards and nominations

Cannes Film Festival César Awards European Film Awards Lumières Award Other awards