Olivier Assayas is a filmmaker who also happened to have been a film critic. He's a French auteur who also spoke to journalists in perfect Italian while at the recent Rome Film Festival. He is a man born in the mid-50's who looks and dresses like he could be 40-something, as well as a revered name in world cinema who admits that film students today have created their own relationship with movies thanks to the internet. He makes for a fascinating read.
I'll admit to having a soft spot for French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, ever since interviewing him in Locarno. There was something about his passionate way of talking cinema and tackling with thoughtfulness every question I posed to him that truly entranced. The man also possesses a great inner elegance, a savoir-faire with languages, and a snazzy way of dressing, in fact that day he wore a t-shirt with a colorful Godzilla silkscreened on the front. He is a journalist's -- who has cinema with a conscience on her mind -- dream-come-true interview.
That said, I haven't wished to interview Assayas in person since that Locarno chat. Partly because our company that day was a soul that, now gone, makes it impossibly sad to separate some places and people from his presence. But also because I felt that on that occasion we had pretty much talked about it all. How much more could there to say about cinema between two people...
At this year's Rome Film Festival, during a press conference Assayas gave prior to his encounter with the public, I was proven wrong. I mean, I sat in the audience and watched the filmmaker answer gently yet powerfully questions about French cinema, the phenomenon of streaming series as well as the Marvel controversy, which has been the headline of every clickbait article in the last two weeks. What he had to say once again, changed my outlook and maybe, just a little bit the way intelligent people can, my life.
Learning cinema through film writing
Assayas talked about his early days, "Cinema writing was for me a way to learn cinema. At that time there was a generation of marvelous cinema writers. I was always the youngest, and the boy, the others were the adults. But I listened and thought I was understanding the history of cinema. I was a youngster who wanted to make films, had worked as an assistant and had a much more practical knowledge." Yet today, Assayas admitted he doesn't really read what critics think of his work because "it would influence me, and I think cinema, like any art must be learned with theory and at one point one must be liberated. If you begin to make films thinking what critics will say you’re lost. What you must follow is your intuition. Your intuition is what carries you forward as a filmmaker."
On "La Nouvelle Vague" reinventing cinema
His thoughts on the Nouvelle Vague, the 1960's French New Wave of cinema which included Agnes Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Éric Rohmer among many more, included many mentions of the word "freedom".
"The Nouvelle Vague defined the fact that a filmmakers now had the freedom of lets say a writer who writes romances, make films with less money and more freedom, thus reinventing cinematic art in the process." Assayas continued, "When we talk about heritage it’s an international heritage. It’s not so much what it has changed in French cinema, even if it did change everything in French cinema but also how international filmmakers took charge of it and decided to make a different kind of cinema. Everything remains from the Nouvelle Vague. I would make very different films if that hadn’t been there. And I think that’s true for all filmmakers who have an artistic vision and not an industrial one." He also admitted that "international success gave a validation to this way of thinking about cinema. This idea of the Nouvelle Vague is a protection for free cinema around the world.
His thoughts on cinema in the age of the internet
Assayas talked about film criticism in the age of internet writing by pointing out that "today the reflection on cinema has migrated from the hard press to the internet where there is so much more on cinema than at any other time before." In his writing days, he admitted "the general opinion was decided by cinema magazines. Now these magazines have lost their importance because there is a free cinema writing culture available on the internet. Cinephilia was defined by the French cinematheque. There weren't VHS or DVDs or the internet, you would watch things on TV or in cinemas. There was a culture which was unified. At the advent of the internet the history of cinema was available, accessible on the TV, and each individual could create his own specific relationship with cinema." That has led today to a new dialogue between audiences and filmmakers, which Assayas described as, "each person on the internet could look for what corresponded them. And build his/her own relationship to the medium. Today, they have invented their rapport with this art." Will cinemas every go away? The issue was raised when TV first burst onto the scene and now, sixty years later, theaters are still showing films. So his short answer was "no."
On TV and streaming series
Humble as ever, which is another great quality of the French filmmaker who took time to sign autographs and take selfies with journalists after the conference, Assayas admitted "I’m not a series of spectator and what I say is limited by my ignorance. You can work on a longer format. I can talk about it in the sense that TV allowed me to make a film like 'Carlos' -- a film lasting five hours. I talk about it as a film. When I made a shorter version of 'Carlos' I didn’t like it." He continued, "the other dimension is also the dependence. The addiction., which is a dimension I don’t like, it doesn’t interest me, There are only so many hours in the day, so that doesn’t inspire me. When do you eat, when do you sleep? When do you live? I feel ambivalence in the success of the series. Many great artist make exceptional things but I'm not familiar with the format."
And finally, tackling the Marvel controversy
About the headline-grabbing latest controversy which has pitted Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese against the legions of Marvel fans around the world, Assayas shared his personal opinion. "I’ve always loved popular American cinema and I think that American cinema was never as stupid as it has become today. I’m a reader of Marvel comics — but in the cinema, it’s gotten lost. There is less sex, less violence, less life and less originality. I've seen a few, not many and I don’t like them. Artistically they seem very poor, visually very poor, they all look like each other, I have a lot of difficulty identifying with 'Thor' or 'Captain America' as they are today." He concluded, "there is an invasion of these films which have this powerful economic presence. Prequels, sequels, this is an industrial vision of cinema which I profoundly dislike. I’m a lover of Marvel comics and grew up with these characters as well as American cinema but I feel like something important got lost."