Ms. Casta, a good 20 years after your role as Falbala in the film “Asterix and Obelix against Caesar”, many people associate your name with your modeling career. Now the Locarno Film Festival has given you an honorary award as an actress, the “Excellence Award”. How often do you find your work to be excellent yourself?
Never!
I wish I had that confidence.
But unfortunately I am not like that.
Does that mean you are plagued by self-doubt?
There are already things that I am convinced of.
For example, I don't take a role if I'm not sure that it can turn into a good film.
But in my own work I still look a little more and try to do something different and better every time.
I think it's good not to be too confident in this regard, especially since it also sparks my ambition.
And it doesn't mean that I'm still not an actress with conviction.
You started your career as a model, you played your first film role in 1999 in “Asterix and Obelix against Caesar”. When did you first get the feeling that you had arrived as an actress?
To be honest, I never really made a distinction between these two professions.
For me, here as there, it's about conveying feelings and giving expression to my inner being.
I'm pretty unfiltered and direct, I don't wear a mask like many other actresses.
Did you immediately feel that you were being taken seriously in the film industry?
That is, of course, a different topic. Cinema and fashion didn't really go together at the time, both industries looked at each other with a certain snobbery. In the film world, I felt like nobody and I had the feeling that nobody really knew what to do with me. The problem was not that I had no experience as an actress, but more the fact that I was very well known and successful as a model. There were many other models around me who established themselves in the film industry much faster, simply because no one there was familiar with their previous work and they did not address it. In the United States, I would certainly have done it easier. There are fewer of these reservations when people are successful in different careers.American actors can also be successful as pop stars or on the catwalk without anyone turning up their noses.
It was Yves Saint Laurent who was the first to tell you that you were actually an actress and not a model, right?
Exactly.
I was 16 years old then and I didn't know what he meant.
I wasn't happy about that, it made me feel insecure.
I thought I was doing my job badly and feared that he would no longer want to work with me.
Only later did I understand that he saw something in me that I had not yet recognized myself.
Which was probably no wonder, after all, he was a visionary and understood women better than anyone else.
It is interesting that you have never turned your back on the fashion industry until now. Wouldn't that have made your film career easier?
My passion for fashion didn't just stop. And I owe everything to my work as a model. I learned so much from this job. It was just not enough because as a model you are more of an object than a subject. I am an incredibly emotional person and I can't always control my emotions. So I looked for ways to let my emotions out. That was not always in demand in the fashion world, after all it is mostly just about portraying a certain idea of beauty. Of course there were exceptions like Herb Ritts.