Slideshow

Hollywood's Triple Threat

O.K., fine! Beautiful model turned actress—we get it. But then there’s the fact that she writes and directs, too; her first short film, Thinning the Herd, went to the Cannes film festival in 2004. Oh, and she paints and takes photographs, and has a new coffee-table book filled with her work—including many startling, naked self-portraits—entitled Grafiske Historier by Lilly Dillon. Oh, and she learned French in just a little over three months before filming with Mr. Besson. Most annoying, she’s effervescent and likeable, down-to-earth. She has a mouth like a truck driver’s, and no filter at all when it comes to talking about things like her dabbling in bisexuality (“It was just another part of my life”), the fashion industry (“They are a bunch of insecure little crybabies and I have no respect for them”) or the current Hollywood scene (“They make a movie just to make a movie. They go to yoga, then they eat sushi, then they go to yoga but with hotter temperatures, then they get a massage, and then they get their nails done. That’s their fucking life. Who wants to talk about that?”)

In a world where Hollywood stars are cosseted and managed within an inch of their lives, coached to spit out the perfect, bland sound bite, Ms. Rasmussen is a rare thing: a woman who doesn’t seem to care a whit about how her public perceives her, or how her words or actions might affect her career.

Born in Denmark, Ms. Rasmussen grew up rather unusually, in what she calls a family commune. Her parents each were married multiple times, and between them all, she grew up with eight siblings, under one single roof. “Kids are the religion in my family,” she shrugged. “Do not have kids if you’re not willing to give up everything for them. Why reproduce? You can have sex all you want, take pleasure—great. But why reproduce unless you raise your kid thinking it is going to be the savior of the world? That’s how I was raised.

“Everyone is an artist, schoolteacher or a historian—I got three kick-ass moms,” she continued. “In Scandinavia, there is no difference between men and women. That’s how I grew up. My mom can take a car engine apart, rewire a lamp, or solve any mathematical fucking solution. She’s punk rock!” Growing up, she said, she was obsessed with storytelling and made up tales with her sister (“ridiculous, dramatic young-girl stuff—love and entanglement … but guns would always somehow get in there. My mom saved them all—they’re horrendously good.”). She watched tons of old movies and became enamored with the classics. “Rural Denmark, darling,” she said, laughing. “Nothing else to do—it was cows and a VCR.” She talked raptly about her early cinematic influences: Carol Reed, Howard Hawks, Hal Ashby, John Huston and Sergio Leone (when her cell phone rang later on, the chime was the famed whistle from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly).

Ms. Rasmussen has little time for today’s Hollywood starlets, even the smart ones, who seem dizzy with the pressure to love and succeed. “Fuck, girls still to this day don’t talk like they do in The Big Sleep,” she said. “There are no girl characters like that now. They’re all bippity-boppity. The female icons that girls look up to now? Honestly, I’m ashamed of being a woman.” She talked excitedly about how, in today’s cinema, “tough” women are unbelievable. “Every single actress does the same exact thing,” she said. “They walk like this”—she got up and squared her shoulders exaggeratedly. “No one can walk like this! Because if someone came chasing after you, you couldn’t run away. But if someone is really tough, they move like an animal.” She flattened herself against the wall. “You can see them, they are in the shadows and alongside the side of the building. They’re not walking around like ‘I’m so tough.’”

She folded her long limbs back into the chair. “It’s so dumb the way females are portrayed. Women who can kick ass but still have a heart—we’re not represented at all in the cinema.”

At age 15, after a visit with her mother to New York City, Ms. Rasmussen decided to stay on and lived on her own for a year. “I was a very respectable good girl,” she said. “Much better than I am now!” She lived at 425 West 13th Street—a fashionable address now, but still an honest-to-God meatpacking district 14 years ago. “I lived in a 7,000-square-foot concrete slab, and below me were the meat hooks. In the summer, it smelled like dead animal.” She knew she wanted to make films but found it was easy to survive by modeling occasionally. “You could take a picture and they’d give you $4,000, stick it in your pocket and go travel for a few months. I’m grateful beyond measure I didn’t have to adhere to any sort of normal life. If you are responsible for your own education, you’re going to do a better job.”

Chasing after a surfer boy, she eventually made her way to Huntington Beach, Calif., and enrolled at the Hollywood Film Institute for a spell, to learn the technical side of the business. But she was quickly disillusioned with her fellow students, the sons and daughters of Hollywood producers. “I was like, ‘Fuck you guys—you losers.’ So I dropped out.” Instead, she sweet-talked her way onto film sets, to try and absorb by osmosis. “I’m a girl, so I can … you know, I can do the whole heeeey thing,” she said. She demonstrated, forming her perfect face into a perfect coquette smile. “It works! Works when I get pulled over, too.”

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine the poor man—or woman—who would try to slow Ms. Rasmussen down. Travel is still a priority, she says; her one constant seems to be her 13-year-old blind cattle dog, Bonnie Clyde. (“She’s very funny. I think she’s a dyke. She won’t let the boys play, but she loooves the girls.”) Somewhere in her early 20’s, Ms. Rasmussen landed in Paris and fell in with an international crowd. “It was a crazy time,” she said. “I was thinking it was O.K. because it was in the name of art.” She was introduced to Brian De Palma, the famed director of Carrie and Scarface, via a woman she had an affair with, and was cast in Femme Fatale, a crime-caper thriller most memorable for Ms. Rasmussen’s makeout scene with Rebecca Romijn.

Ms. Rasmussen is something of a marvel—honest and self-deprecating, but without a shred of apology for any of her unorthodox behavior.

“I was like, ‘Fuck film school!’” she laughed, recalling her time on set. “I tried to learn everything I could. I’d follow Thierry Arbogast [the cinematographer] all day, half-naked—because I was always half-naked in that film, and who better to show your tits to than Thierry Arbogast?—pestering him about what it was like to work with Luc Besson. He must have thought, ‘Who is this crazy naked girl?’”

Hollywood and the big-time fashion industry took notice of the leggy stunner, and Ms. Rasmussen found herself besieged by offers for acting and modeling. “I did an exclusive contract with Gucci and Tom Ford,” she said. “I wanted to pick carefully.” She was disillusioned when she discovered that there was to be little collaboration between her and her employers. “Nobody wanted a vocal model. Fuck the models, they have nothing to do with it—they are in and out faster than anybody can say their names,”
she said. “I’m speaking about the editors, the photographers, the stylists, you name it. They hate getting older, and they hate young pretty girls, and they’re all scared of being found out they aren’t talented.” She has similar feelings about the fashion industry at large. Though she has the face and body (seen in full during her modeling days and her art book) that most girls would likely kill for, she somehow manages to retain her believability when she slams the industry’s unrealistic standards of beauty. “The women that can buy these clothes—let’s say they are between 35 and 45, and they have a beautiful, strong body with a little bit of thigh and a little bit of ass. And they have some lines on their face because you weathered life and you smile a lot. But then you have to hold yourself to an ideal of an anorexic 16-year-old Russian model? It’s fucking bullshit.”

She snorts when people describe her as a Victoria’s Secret model.

“The only time I worked for Victoria’s Secret is because I, like everybody else, wanted to fuck a supermodel. And I did! And that was enough, for that one specific reason.” She laughed. “I’m a little bit like my dog. A little bit.”

As luck would have it, when Ms. Rasmussen started work on her first film short, it was through Luc Besson’s production company, Europa. “I was always around their offices,” she said. “And he [Mr. Besson] would watch me in the hallways. When [the film] got nominated in Cannes, I think Luc was like, ‘What the hell did I produce?’” She had been planning to start work on her first full-length feature when Mr. Besson handed her the script for Angel-A. “He said, ‘This is for you.’ Never in hell would I ever say no to something like that,” she said. “The story is beautiful.” Originally written in English, Mr. Besson then cast Jamel Debbouze, best known from She Hate Me, as Ms. Rasmussen’s co-star and rewrote the script to be in French. “I said, ‘I don’t speak French,’ and he said, ‘You do now—see you in three months!’ I went to Paris the next day, hired a teacher and started learning.” Mr. Besson’s loyal film base is already buzzing over the filmmaker’s long-awaited flick­—his first since 1999’s The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc.

Being on the set with Mr. Besson was the best education of them all, she said. “I like to say that Luc formed me as a filmmaker at an early age. I don’t know how many times I watched the movie The Big Blue. But coming on set with him … it’s just brilliant. He’s done every job: He’s been the grip, the gaffer, the first assistant, second assistant—everything. He has this way of knowing everybody’s job better than they do and executing it with absolute elegance. It was beautiful to see.”

Ms. Rasmussen would be leaving her Soho loft in a few days to head to Belgrade and start scouting locations for the movie that she wrote and will direct, Human Zoo. “I wrote this film in anguish over something that my family had to deal with,” she said, referring to their struggle to legally adopt a girl from Vietnam. “It’s about borders—these little red lines in the sand that mother earth didn’t come with, that we protect with blood and violence and if you went whoosh, they’d be gone.” She’ll complete the triple threat by acting in it as well. “I’m glad I’m directing myself, because if I had to deal with one of those actresses who show up like, ‘I feel fat! I miss my boyfriend!’, I’d smack them—I’d end up in court.” Speaking of boyfriends, Ms. Rasmussen is steadfastly single. “Summer is coming, and I’m leaving it open for romance,” she said. Though, for the record, it’s not Danish men she fancies. “If you are African, I’m happy. What can I say? I’m Scandinavian! Or if you look like a real bad boy.”

Don’t expect her to show up in another Hollywood flick anytime soon. “I’d rather work on what I do …. I’d rather try with all my might for what I believe in. If I end up on some beach in Mexico and nobody ever saw my work, at least I’d have tried to do what I do, and I’m totally fine with it.” She grinned. “Plus, I love the beach in Mexico. So it’s cool.”