Vin Diesel's got the brains and the brawn
By Zap2it
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Vin Diesel is running late. The brawny actor, who barely would have raised eyebrows a year ago, is a very wanted man these days, which leads to waiting nearly four hours for an interview at the Four Seasons Hotel (to be fair, Diesel is only one hour late).

By 6 p.m., a publicist comes in the waiting area and grabs couple of Red Bulls for "Vinnie" -- as "XX director Rob Cohen calls him. Diesel has been up since early in the morning doing interviews for his newest film, XXX. No doubt the Red Bulls will give him enough kick to get him through the rest.
About two hours later, when Diesel finally walks into the room with his entourage, he looks fit, relaxed and in fact more alive and at ease than when I first saw him at noon, when he was being grilled by six journalists at one time all crammed into a tiny room at the hotel.
Don't let the big muscles and the attitude fool you, Diesel is not only smart, but he's also as nice as can be. Wearing a casual shirt and jeans he apologizes for his tardiness as he sits down on the couch and makes himself comfortable.
Maybe it comes from the fact that he's from New York, or that he once worked as a bouncer, but despite his light-speed rise to fame, Diesel (a name he gave himself when he worked as a bouncer), comes across as immediately accessible and very grounded.
"I feel like there's some kind of integrity thing that I don't know if I get from being from New York or from my parents or from my friends, but there's an integrity, an artistic integrity that I try to hold strong to and stay loyal to," he tells Zap2it on how he keeps his cool in Hollywood.
Diesel, 35, got his first big break as a director. Frustrated at the lack of parts being offered to him, Diesel decided to make his own film, the short Mulitfacial, which received critical acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995. When Steven Spielberg saw the film, he reportedly wrote a part in his film, Saving Private Ryan, for the actor, also letting him shoot the second unit scenes in the film. Spielberg's "stamp of approval" led Diesel to land a number of parts, including the voice of the title role in The Iron Giant and a small part in the low budget Boiler Room.
"He got a very small part in a very big movie, and he made the most of it," Cohen tells Zap2it. "In Boiler Room, there's 40 guys in a room in Armani suits, but your eye goes to that bald guy. There's something about Vin that is why movie stars are called movie stars and why there's 20 of them and 10,000 of us making the films."
XXX reunites Cohen and Diesel, who worked together on The Fast and the Furious, the film that made Diesel jump from actor to star.
"Last year Vin was the cool guy and in one year he's become the hot guy," says Cohen. "When we did The Fast and the Furious, Paul Walker was the sexy guy, and Vin was the masculine kind of guy. The pretty boy and the street guy. One year later, Vin Diesel is a sex symbol."
For his part, Diesel says he doesn't see himself as a symbol, in fact he doesn't disagree with the New York Times'" A.O. Scott who called him "the sexiest ugly man in the movies since Anthony Quinn" in a review for "Boiler Room."
"It's probably accurate," he laughs. "I know I'm not pretty."
But that doesn't stop girls from squealing during an advance preview the night before the interview every time he takes off his shirt in XXX.
"The old axioms of 'women want to sleep with him and the men want to have him as a friend' --- well, last night..." laughs Cohen. "He's an anti-hero. In our movie history, when you analyze it, the really cool leading men -- James Dean, Marlon Brando, Bobbie DeNiro, Al Pacino -- they're antiheroes, they're not the heroic guys; you can't say Pacino in The Godfather is a hero. They're not Arnold and Sly and Ben and even Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity, they're smoldering, angry outsiders with chips on their shoulders full of attitude -- and that, that is cool. That's who I'd like to be."
The anti-hero title is something that Diesel agrees with, and even appears to look for in the parts that he plays. In both of his previous action films -- Pitch Black and The Fast and the Furious -- Diesel plays characters who are good guys, despite the fact that they all have committed illegal acts, including murder.
I think the white-washed heroes are something of the '80s. Now the audience is demanding much more complex characters; the filmmaking going public is that much more film savvy and they need multi-layer characters," he says.
"My characters start as underdogs," he adds. "They start off as flawed characters and allow the audience to become heroic with the character. I think it's a thing of the '50s that people just knew exactly how to be good people and nowadays it's less obvious."
Diesel's ethnicity, he's part African-American and part Italian-American, also makes him a new type of action star who isn't easily identifiable.
"I like that I'm multicultural, I embrace my racial ambiguity," he says. "I love to empower people. I love sending the message you can create your dream, you can do whatever you want to do."
These elements also carry over to XXX, in which Diesel plays an extreme sports enthusiast who doesn't mind breaking the rules who gets recruited by the government for an important spy mission. While the role seems like a perfect fit for Diesel, he was initially reluctant to take the role.
"I wouldn't have done the picture if Cohen didn't bring it to me," he says. "The number one thing attractive thing about the film was the fact that Rob was directing it and I could work with him again. That was the carrot."
"Vinnie was looking for the Academy Award-winning script right on the page. And I told him, 'You don't find great scripts, you make scripts great,'" Cohen recalls.
"I think that the first script was a little goofy. Good, but a little too comedic. One of the ways in which Rob enrolled me was by talking about the character's objective," Diesel explains. "We were having cranberry and club sodas at the Chateau Marmont and he said, 'Xander Cage is a nihilist. Xander Cage is least likely to save the world, Xander Cage doesn't give a shit about the world. He's recruited by the CIA to save the world and learns patriotism and learns the value of life.'"
"The zeitgeist of the antihero and the zeitgeist of youth is an antiauthoritarian more than anti-government," adds Cohen. "His real struggle isn't against the government, it's that anyone who tells him what not to do is the enemy."
Another feature that attracted him to XXX"was the possibility of doing created a franchise project. Diesel, Cohen and the film's writer, Rich Wilkes, are already signed on for a sequel to the film, and Diesel sees more than one sequel in the future.
"When I made XXX, I went into thinking that I'm going to do the best that I can to make this a franchise film, to make this a character that lasts," he says.
"It will eventually be more than one," he adds, "but I'm just doing one film at a time."
In the meantime, he's still trying to figure out which project to take on next. "It's so damn tricky because I want to do it all. I want to do it all and I realize I can't anthat's what's weird," he says. "I wish I had more time."
Diesel will next appear in the drama Knockaround Guys, opposite Dennis Hopper, John Malkovich and Barry Pepper, which is slated to open this October. Plus, he's hoping to direct again, hopefully a feature-length version of Multifacial" But one project that he's particularly excited about is Hannibal, which he will both star in and produce.
"I have to do The Chronicles of Riddick first," Diesel says, "but I've never been more excited about a film."
Not to be confused with the film by Ridley Scott, Hannibal tells the story of the Carthaginian general Hannibal the Conqueror, whose forces conquered Spain and then attacked Rome by the North. Hannibal Braca ultimately failed to conquer Rome and was later forced out of several European countries, and eventually committing suicide.
One thing that he's definitely trying to do is take more of a behind-the-scenes role in the films that he stars in.
"It lets everybody know how vested I am in the picture," he explains. "I clarifies my commitment, do you know what I mean? If I say that I'm producing Hannibal, then you know I really give a shit about the movie."
