Just like other famous predecessors of the New Wave, Olivier Assayas starts with everyday stories, enriching them with a powerful personal touch and originality, using improvisation as they did…




Olivier Assayas (1955) is one of the most interesting contemporary French filmmakers, often presented as the successor of the popular New Wave of the late fifties and the first half of the sixties, due to his style and the beginnings of his film career. This period launched French films to the very top of world cinema, introducing great names such as Godard, Chabrol, Truffaut, Rohmer and Rivette. Certain similarities are found in the fact that Assayas also uses almost everyday stories, enriching them with a powerful personal touch and originality, but he also enjoys improvisations, just like the other great names of the industry. He believes that a director must be courageous in following his instincts, and that the very point of diverting from the original screenplay structure opens the space that breathes life into the film.

However, the comparisons to other famous filmmakers have been more influenced by the fact that he also (although some quarter of a century later) started his career as a film critic for one of the world's most famous film magazines Cahiers du cinéma, and then moved into directing films. Beyond that obvious similarity there are a number of significant differences. By writing for the renowned magazine, the members of the New Wave took their first steps in expressing their love of film to the point of obsession with the medium that they knew so extremely well, valuing its traditions, to finally devote themselves to it fully as authors. Assayas, on the other hand, grew up in an environment closely connected to film. His father Jacques Rémy (full name Raymond Assayas) earned personal renown after World War II as a respectable screenwriter who wrote for big names like Christian-Jaque, Henri Decoin and Claude Autant-Lara, acclaimed film directors of the time, listed by Truffaut at the beginning of his career as representatives of the not so beloved “script-based” cinema, which revolved around narration and dialogue, while film directing only served as its uninventive illustration. With the help of his father, Olivier Assayas quickly learned how to work on the set, did some writing for television as well, and assisted in Richard Donner’s production of Superman in 1978.

Even though it seemed his path to film was set out for him, unlike the members of the New Wave, he wasn’t showing particular interest in it, nor was he a film lover. He was also disappointed with the lack of influence on society of revolutionary ideas from 1968 in the decade that followed, so he focused on other art forms after completing his studies – literature, drawing and graphics, only to discover, in the texts of the Situationists and British punk rock music in the winter of 1976/7, new motivation and a new approach to film. This resulted in his first very interesting film Copyright (1979), which encouraged editors of Cahiers du cinéma Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana to offer him a collaborative project. Thus Assayas took a different path at the beginning of his career, as opposed to the New Wave group that went from writing film critiques to making films, although he had made a few well recognized short films. His critic reveals his appreciation for the New Wave and Bergman. Just as the New Wave group revealed the value of American genre directors to France and the world, making them world classics, Assayas did the same for the cinematography of the Far East, mainly Hong Kong and Taiwan, in a special edition of Cahiers du cinéma. This enabled him to travel to that part of the world where he was fascinated to meet the great Taiwanese film director Hsiao-hsien Hou, who he portrayed in a documentary feature he did for Cinéma de notre temps (Filmmakers of Our Time) in 1997, and was even more delighted by the Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung, the first Chinese actress to have been awarded for Best Leading Female Actress at the festival in Berlin for Center Stage / Yuen Ling-yuk (1992) by Stanley Kwan, and in Cannes for Clean (2004). It was a role Assayas wrote specifically for her, as well as the leading role in Irma Vep (1996). They were married from 1998 to 2001.

Irma Vep is the film that introduced Assayas to wider audiences, although his first feature-length films (which led him to abandon his career in film criticism), portraying young people who love rock music and defy social norms, proved him to be an extremely interesting author. In his originality, he combined experimental and popular film, as well as elements of various film traditions, from the Far Eastern to European, especially French, both New Wave and earlier classics. Irma Vep is a sort of homage to Louis Feuillade, since the film title is the anagram of Vampire, one of the silent film maestro’s characters.

Remodelling these very different styles in his own way results in the high artistic value and visual expression of each frame, often starting from very intimate, almost meaningless common situations, to become, by means of filming, more important than the dialogue itself or even acting, in order to discover characters’ personalities. Such frames are – in the author’s own words – structured like music, which he takes into account during the screenwriting stage: ... I analyze the sequence of frames as a rhythmic structure – “here we will have a frame sequence, then a series of changing views, then a system plan / reverse and then back to a frame sequence”, etc. Such musicality relies on the movement (of the camera), which is my way of following the feelings and reactions of the characters. This is in my opinion the most accurate description of what is going on in them.

The characters thus created and designed are usually individuals who experience some form of trauma while isolating themselves from the group or society they are tied to, and in most dramatic moments gain a different and deeper insight into their actions and their true nature, a feature shared by all Assayas’s films regardless of how different their theme or plot may be. It is precisely this characteristic, which is the foundation of his originality, that has placed him at the top of contemporary French film. (Tomislav Kurelec)