Quotes of the Day

Unlike their U.S. counterparts, French actors aren't in the habit of radically changing their appearance for onscreen roles. Rather than piling on or losing kilos to look the part, their acting chops are more focused on inhabiting a character's spirit while their demeanor and vocal timbre tend to remain constant. Eleven years into his acting career, Romain Duris may have a different hairstyle for nearly every film, but he has otherwise been consistent onscreen. Yet one professional shift has begun to take place for the 31-year-old. With his wrenching, kinetic performance in the surprise international arthouse hit, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, he leaves the throng of appealing, slacker-ish young actors and joins the ranks of major French screen performers.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a rare beast; whereas the transcontinental culture muse usually flows east to west, this film — directed by Jacques Audiard and known in France as De Battre Mon Coeur S'est Arreté — is a remake of a gritty, 1978 urban drama, Fingers, by U.S. director James Toback. Fingers tells the story of a young man caught between the pull of his father's world of small-time mafia and his talents as a classical pianist in the mould of his late mother. What's more, Audiard's version, which moves the story to present-day Paris and the city's real estate racket, improves on the original. For Duris, who takes on the lead role originally played by the dependably feisty Harvey Keitel, it was a chance to pick up where that golden age of manic, rough-edged, American filmmaking in the 1970s left off. "There's a feel to Fingers that existed in other movies of the time as well," Duris explains at a vintage Belle Epoque brasserie in his Paris neighborhood not far from Bastille. "Actors like Pacino, De Niro and others, there is something they were doing then, a way of taking cinema to the extreme. And me, a little French actor at my basic level … you watch Dog Day Afternoon, and you just say, 'wow!' It's incredibly motivating."

Like those actors he admires, Duris makes an unlikely screen idol: he's not tall, has a way of speaking in bursts from a rather pursed mouth and looks more handsomely unique than outright handsome. His success as an actor is even more unlikely considering it was an accidental detour. Originally set on being a painter, he was spotted on the street by a casting director in 1993, and agreed to audition for a role in Cédric Klapisch's Le Péril Jeune, (titled Good Old Daze in English). A minor cult classic, it recounts the lives of several friends in high school as they look back ten years on — a sort of inverted Big Chill. Duris' performance is natural and engaging, though hardly one that would seem to signal the launch of a major career. After small parts in TV and other films, he was back again in a supporting role in Klapisch's 1996 film, When the Cat's Away. Duris' first leading role came in 1997 with The Crazy Stranger, a film by Tony Gatlif, about a young Frenchman traveling to Romania in search of a singer. Along the way, he's continued to work with certain directors regularly: Olivier Dahan (twice), Tony Gatlif (thrice) and Klapisch (five times). "These people have become friends, artistically and intimately," says Duris, whose signature bushy hair has been shorn close to the scalp for what he describes as "a little indie film" he's presently shooting. "I love the stories these guys tell in their films, and their visions of the world interest me."

Until 2001, Duris considered his acting career as kind of a lark and says he even considered getting out of the business. But while making the hit film L'Auberge Espagnole (which yielded the 2005 sequel, Russian Dolls), his outlook changed. "Something happened while shooting that movie, where suddenly I had to make an effort to look elsewhere to find another rhythm, another way to talk, another behavior, another personality, really," he explains. "Before that, the roles always had an element of my own nature. Now, it's deeper. I'm transported somewhere else, and it's more interesting, more satisfying for me." This interior transformation is evident to filmmakers as well as filmgoers. "In a certain sense, it was my screenplay that chose him," says Audiard, the director of The Beat That My Heart Skipped. "The story evokes a character who is at the threshold between adolescence and maturity, and I sensed this precisely within Romain himself. I think that aspect served Romain, who in turn served the story."

Part of the challenge for Duris was to play the piano as convincingly as his character, Thomas, who is supposed to have trained classically years earlier. Duris' sister Caroline, an accomplished concert pianist, taught her brother the proper fingering, and it is her playing that is heard on the soundtrack. In the story, Thomas tries to regain his ability, spending long hours at the piano, practicing elaborate pieces. These scenes, says Duris, are essentially a fresh take on method acting. "Learning the fingering was far from easy, but it had to be done to have a certain kind of authenticity. Thomas's outbursts and violent frustrations are exactly what I experienced with Caroline, so I knew just how to express it."

Although it's a remake, Duris says he approached the movie as a wholly original work. But there was one image from Fingers — a film he thinks is a fascinating but flawed — that stayed with him during the shoot: "It's the moment where Keitel is hunched over the piano, full of sweat, muscles and energy, and he looks like a beast." Says the painter manqué: "It's like a Rembrandt painting, and it gave me inspiration, a kind of vigor."

Three years ago Duris had a minor role as a scruffy youth who hops easily into bed with Kate Hudson's character in the Merchant-Ivory love letter-to-Paris, Le Divorce. That is as close as he's come to Hollywood so far, and he's in no rush to get to L.A.. There is still so much he wants to explore in French films, he says, like his next project: reincarnating the illustrious 17th century playwright-actor Molière. Duris will need yet another hairstyle for that one, but now it's what walks beneath it that audiences will have their eye on.

• GRANT ROSENBERG / Paris
• Romain Duris has one thing in his favor ... consistency