The “radical and bold” 1995 movie that hooked Riz Ahmed from the start: “It completely pulled me in”
Riz Ahmed is one of British acting’s most successful exports over the last decade or so, so you imagine it must have been a strange experience in some ways to make his most recent project, a comedy series called Bait, in which he plays a struggling actor who can’t seem to land a role for love nor money.
The Prime Video show got some rave reviews, though, meaning Ahmed pulled it off without issue, like he has done on all manner of major movies since he broke through in the really very good Jake Gyllenhaal thriller Nightcrawler in 2014.
Since then, he’s picked up an Oscar nomination for the deaf drummer drama The Sound of Metal, and he won an Academy Award for The Long Goodbye, a short film made to accompany his second studio album, released in 2022. Add that to two Golden Globe nods plus an Emmy win for HBO’s drama The Night Of, and you’ve got someone who is operating at the top of not just movies but hip-hop too.
And that combination is one that serves as a gritty backdrop to one of the best thrillers of the 1990s, and a movie that makes up a quarter of Ahmed’s favourite four films of all time. 1995’s La Haine, starring Vincent Cassel, was a landmark in French cinema, showing the realities of cultures smashing together in Paris’ Banlieues, the low-income suburban housing projects that are home to many immigrants to France.
Ahmed told Letterboxd, “La Haine just completely pulled me in, just how stylishly it’s shot. There’s so many sequences I can think about now that are such bravura moments.”
Adding, “If you think about that sequence in the housing estate when they start playing KRS ONE’s ‘Sound of the police’ mixed in with the Edith Piaf tune ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ – they did that without drones, they did that with wires, I think and pulleys.”
“So, visually it was crazy, the story seemed to be so radical and bold. It just really stayed with me.”
Riz Ahmed on La Haine
Made on a budget of just $2.5million, La Haine brought in $15.3m at the box office and won a host of industry awards for its director, Mathieu Kassovitz. It was also the movie that transformed the fortunes of Cassel, who went on to star in Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth and other Hollywood movies like Black Swan, Ocean’s Thirteen and Jason Bourne.
The film tells the story of 24 hours in the lives of three friends from one of the poorest parts of inner-city Paris after riots are sparked by the beating of an immigrant in police custody. Kassovitz was inspired to make it after the 1993 killing of a man from Zaire who was shot at point-blank range by police despite being chained to a radiator. Much of the movie was soundtracked by a French hardcore hip-hop group called Assassin, one of the members of which was Cassel’s brother.
Ahmed, meanwhile, is likely to have more awards noise to contend with once Alejandro G Iñárritu’s latest movie Digger hits cinemas in October. Starring Tom Cruise, it’s a black comedy with Ahmed, Jesse Plemons and John Goodman in supporting roles and promises to be a global hit. Iñárritu already has seven Oscar nominations and four wins to his name.
