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| Birth Name(s) : Mathieu Kassovitz |
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Full Mathieu Kassovitz Biography
Mathieu Kassovitz (born 3 August 1967) is a French director, screenwriter, occasional actor and is considered one of contemporary France's top emerging film talents, known for his searing Cannes-winning drama La Haine.
Kassovitz was born in Paris, the son of Chantal Remy, a film editor, and Peter Kassovitz, a director and writer. Kassovitz's mother is French and Catholic and his father is a Hungarian Jew who left Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Kassovitz is married to French ex-actress Julie Mauduech, whom he directed and acted alongside with in his 1993 film Métisse (Café au lait, English title) and who made a short appearance in La Haine (during the scene in the Parisian art gallery). They have a daughter, Carmen. Mauduech is now a costume designer for movies.
As a filmmaker, Kassovitz has a number of artistic and commercial successes under his belt. He wrote and directed La Haine (1995, English translation: Hate), a hugely successful and very controversial film in France dealing with race relations which won the César Award for Best Film and netted Kassovitz the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival. When he was compared to Spike Lee because the film was being compared to Lee's Do the Right Thing, he noted the irony:
"I don't know if it's really important, or intelligent even, when people say to me I'm a white Spike Lee, because they said to Spike Lee you're a black Woody Allen".
He later directed Les Rivières Pourpres (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 commercial failure, although it grossed over twice its roughly $40 million budget), with Halle Berry and Penélope Cruz that he did to earn the money he needed to develop a far more personal project Babylon Babies, the adaptation of one of Maurice Dantec's books.
For his next project, Kassovitz purchased the film rights for the novel Johnny Mad Dog by Congolese writer Emmanuel Dongala. The film was directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire and is in post-production as of late 2007.
Kassovitz is most famous outside France for his role as Nino Quincampoix in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film Amélie. Among many other credits, he also had small roles in La Haine (which he also directed), Birthday Girl, Café Au Lait and The Fifth Element. He also played one of the main roles in Amen. (2003) by Costa-Gavras.
Kassovitz is also recognizable for playing a conflicted Belgian explosives expert in Steven Spielberg's controversial 2005 film Munich, alongside Eric Bana and Geoffrey Rush. He explained several times he accepted acting parts only for the experience of knowing what it is to act, to be able to be a better director of actors afterward, to meet directors he admires and learn from them by working with them, and to take part in great projects. |
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