As his most recent film, Unfaithful, about an affair with an older woman, is released, actor Olivier Martinez is in Ireland making his next, which has a similar theme. Michael Dwyer caught up with a busy man
It's different in France, explains Olivier Martinez, as we discuss the contrasting responses of the participants involved in an adulterous affair in his new movie, Unfaithful. He plays Paul, the charming young Frenchman who seduces Connie, an older, married American woman played by Diane Lane in this new film from Fatal Attraction director Adrian Lyne, with Richard Gere as Connie's initially unsuspecting husband.
After Paul and Connie consummate their relationship, she replays the event over and over in her mind on the train journey home, and she is visibly torn between guilt and excitement. Paul suffers no guilty feelings whatsoever, telling her that there are no such things as mistakes, only what people do and don't do.
"It's a cultural thing," Martinez says. "She's American and he's French, and the Americans feel more guilt about sexuality. It comes from their puritan culture, and we don't have that in France. He just wants to enjoy the moment, whereas she is already regretting it. It's a very moral movie and I like that. It shows that what you choose to do in your life changes your life and makes you what you are."
Nevertheless, he says he found it difficult working on the sex scenes for the film.
"Of course, it's like when you do a fight scene - it's not real. What you need is to feel secure and comfortable with people, and we talked with the director beforehand to establish what we would do and what we wouldn't do. It's not a porn film. It plays with the imagination of the audience and they think they are seeing more than what they are really seeing. I would be very happy for my mother to go to see it!"
We meet in the Dublin hotel where Martinez is based while working on his latest movie, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone, in which he again plays a character who becomes sexually involved with an older woman, this time played by Helen Mirren. Originally filmed in 1961 with the 48-year-old Vivien Leigh and the 23-year-old Warren Beatty in the leading roles, the film is based on the only novel written by Tennessee Williams.
Set in post-war Italy, the new version, shot in Rome and Dublin, features Mirren as an ageing, widowed actress falling in love with a gigolo played by Martinez.
"We have been working long, long days, but it's been great," says Martinez. "It's a fantastic cast. I'm very happy. I can hide my thick accent behind another thick accent."
This is only the third English-language role for the handsome French actor, who speaks four languages and looks a good deal younger than his 36 years.
Born into a working-class family in Paris, he had no interest in school and left as soon as he could, when he was17.
"They don't let you leave any earlier in France," he says. "You have to stay until you are 17. I was glad to leave. I never learned anything at school. I learned these languages by visiting other countries. I could hardly speak any English before I made Before Night Falls, but I learned it very quickly. I always spoke some broken Spanish because my roots are in Spain."
During the first six years after leaving school, he enrolled for compulsory military service and worked in a variety of odd jobs and as a welterweight boxer (his father was a middleweight champion).
"I had nothing to do and I was good at nothing. So I decided to try acting. I applied to the Conservatoire National, which is the best school. If you don't have money, they will assist you as a student. I passed the exam and I was accepted. And since I put my feet on the stage, everything has become easier in my life."
His first work as a professional actor was in the theatre, where he caught the eye of a casting director, who brought him to the attention of Diva director, Jean-Jacques Beineix. He was invited to read for a leading role in the next Beineix film, IP5, got the part and found himself co-starring with the legendary Yves Montand, whose last film this was.
"My first movie was with Yves Montand, my second with Marcello Mastroianni, and my third with Juliette Binoche - it was not a bad start," Martinez says proudly. "They were great opportunities for me to learn more and to raise my level." He denies reports that Mon-tand's health suffered irreparably as a result of working on IP5, which involved scenes in which he spent long hours in icy waters.
"Montand was a tough, big guy. If those stories were true, I would say it, but they're not true at all. They hurt Beineix very much, which was very unfair. I was in the water, too, and it was cold, but not so cold," he says.
HIS second film, 1, 2, 3 Soleil, directed by Bertrand Blier and featuring Mastroianni, earned Martinez the prestigious French film award, the César, for the most promising young actor of 1994, and he consolidated his position with his next movie, the sweeping 19th-century historical romance, The Horseman on the Roof.
"I think it was my most important movie ever. It's a big epic and a beautiful story." He was ideally cast as a dashing Italian cavalry officer who meets a young woman, played by Binoche, searching for her husband in Provence. An off-screen relationship developed between the two actors, which made them the reluctant objects of a great deal of French media interest.
Martinez's work in two Spanish films, Eric Barbier's Torero and Bigas Luna's The Chambermaid on the Tiitanic, led to artist and director Julian Schnabel giving him his first English-language role in Before Night Falls, the powerful, factually-based biopic of the tormented gay Cuban poet and novelist, Reinaldo Arenas. Martinez played Lazaro Gomez Carrilles, the man who becomes the best friend of Arenas after they meet in an artists' colony.
"Schnabel had seen me in a number of Spanish movies I had done, and he especially liked my work in the Bigas Luna film. It was funny because, at that time, I was also waiting to hear about another movie in America, and I knew I could only do one of them. I wanted very much to work with Schnabel, and he called me and offered me the role. Then, 15 minutes later, the other director called and offered me the other movie, but I told him he was 15 minutes too late. It's funny how so little time can make such a difference."
Unfaithful is Martinez's first Hollywood studio movie. Before he was cast in the role, his character, Paul, was not intended to be a Frenchman. "I came to read for the role with Diane. And it worked really well and I was offered the role."
As a re-working of a French classic, Claude Chabrol's gripping, sophisticated 1968 thriller, La Femme Infidele, the movie may well come under attack from the French critics when it opens in France.
"I think that, if it is attacked in France, it will be by some intellectual in Paris, who will do it for political reasons, even though it is an homage to a French movie," Martinez says.
"I think it is a compliment to Chabrol's work that he can make a film in France and then, over 30 years later, it is remade in America. That shows the modernity of the subject, and it would work just as well if it were made now in Italy or Ireland. In France, I'm afraid, so many critics approach everything for political reasons, to show they are smarter than everybody else. It's complete bullshit and it's very Parisian."
He talks enthusiastically about working with Richard Gere - who built his career on playing youthful sexual predators, in Looking for Mr Goodbar and American Gigolo. "I hope I will also do the older man one day," Martinez says. "That's part of the process. You age and change, and your work changes. He was very smart to do this role, because if you're attached to the image the media mould of you, then you're not an actor any more. You're more like a puppet. An actor shouldn't care about his image."
Martinez describes his character, Paolo, the gigolo in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone, as a dreamer who lives in a fantasy world.
"He's like a child in a way, and he wants to imagine himself in a very different life to what he has. He has a very harsh life. It's after the war and he's very poor. And he is very easily manipulated by the contessa, played by Anne Bancroft. She's like a madame, the way she makes all the arrangements. She's fantastic."
One of the high points of his time in Dublin was dinner every night at the end of shooting with Bancroft and her husband, Mel Brooks.
"They are so funny. So many nights I was going to bed still laughing about what was said at dinner."
He first came here eight years ago for a two-week holiday in Connemara, he says. With Juliette Binoche?
"I can't tell you. It's personal." He is firmly protective of any details relating to his private life and he once sued a French publication for claiming that Binoche was pregnant by him.
"I'm very clean and very honest, always very straight with everybody. The journalists in France know that. I never compromised myself in any situation. My personal life is more important than my career."
Unfaithful is on general release