"When I was a kid, I didn't see how I could fit in the French cinema industry," Mr. Cassel said by phone from Spain, where he is shooting Jan Kounen's "Blueberry," a French-financed western. "I was really attracted by New York and the Actors Studio. I went there — not to the Actors Studio, but to a place called the Actors Institute — and did a few workshops and classes, and then I went back to France."

"There is a lightness about the acting classes in France, and there is something very serious, and usually with no irony, in American classes — it's very close to the shrink thing," Mr. Cassel said. "I feel like I'm in the middle — I try to be very light, to think of acting as nothing, and on the other hand, I am very serious about it. If I don't take it seriously, then I have nothing left."

Mr. Cassel is the son of Jean-Pierre Cassel, a French leading man of the 1960's. The writer and director of "Read My Lips" has a pedigree, too: he's Jacques Audiard, the son of Michel Audiard, one of France's most popular and prolific screenwriters. "Either you do everything to be the same as your father," Mr. Cassel said, "or you do everything to be different. Me, I've been fighting against it, I can tell you that. My father is best known for his light comedies, and I'm best known for crazy bad guys with short tempers."

In "Read My Lips," which opens in Manhattan today, Mr. Cassel plays a recently paroled petty thief. He is taken on as an intern by a painfully shy woman (Emmanuelle Devos), a secretary in a real estate company. They pool their complementary resources in an audacious attempt to rob a mob-connected nightclub owner.

"The film began as something very dark," Mr. Cassel said, "but after the second day, when I started to work with Emmanuelle, something much lighter came out of our relationship. Instead of being a Dostoyevsky kind of mood, it became like an Italian comedy from the 60's."

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