Olivier Assayas, the prolific French screenwriter, director and film critic whose movies include the stylish film-within-a-film Irma Vep (1996), the prophetic global business shocker Demonlover (2002), the bittersweet family drama Summer Hours (2008) and the large-scale Venezuelan terrorist thriller Carlos (2010), is nothing if not daring and diverse, a latter-day New Wave heir and director of 15 features disparate in theme but tangential siblings in their frequently sleek, super stylish aesthetics, perhaps Assayas’ hallmark, many of them cerebral, detached nods to New Wave directors a generation past.
His new picture, the often mysterious and meditative Clouds of Sils Maria, features his longtime friend and colleague Juliette Binoche as an internationally renowned actress forced into a crisis of self-examination while returning, three decades later, to the play that made her a star. Also starring a meditative Kristen Stewart as her faithful personal assistant and Chloe Grace Moretz as a brash American starlet not far from her own image (or Stewart’s, for that matter), Clouds of Sils Maria is all about reflection and reflections, versions of ourselves and whether those we present, or those we see in the mirror, are truth.
I caught up with sixty-year-old Olivier Assayas recently to chat about his longtime relationship with muse Binoche, whom he first worked with in 1985’s Rendez-vous and then later directed in the poignant Summer Hours, Cesar-winning Stewart’s revelatory turn and his thoughts on the increasingly global nature of the movie business.
You have a long history with Juliette Binoche that dates back decades, and the role of Marie Enders was specifically written for her. I’d like to hear your take on how much of Juliette informs Marie, or perhaps vice versa, as well as your relationship with her.
Juliette was very much the inspiration for this film. Obviously she is both Marie Enders and not Marie Enders. This is a movie where we are playing with the border, seeing both Juliette Binoche at work and her method of approaching characters, so that part was very much inspired by her, but also how she is playing Marie Enders, a very different kind of woman with different layers. That is also what the film is about. Juliette can have fun playing someone that is inspired by her. I have known her forever and we worked together for the first time in the 80s. In 1985, I wrote a movie named Rendez-vous that made her famous, and we’ve been friends ever since. We share those roots. Our careers have similar roots.
So when I started thinking about Clouds of Sils Maria and Juliette and I started discussing it, I knew it would have to do with time and how I have seen her grow, transform and adapt to an ever-changing world. I am not just familiar with Juliette, but I understand her from the inside in the sense that we somehow grew up together, so I can approach the idea of working with her differently; show a side of her that few people know. So in that sense, a lot of it is in my writing. But it is also in how she approaches this, plays with it and is reflective. By the same token, it really is a movie where you are not only seeing Valentine, her assistant, but you are also seeing Kristen Stewart. It was the same for Chloe Grace Moretz. You never lose perspective of the actor. I used whatever idea we had of who those actresses are. The irony of this movie is that it is a mirror game, though of course I hope that is not all it is. Ultimately I think it is a very straightforward theme about aging and identity.
You mention Kristen Stewart, who is a revelation here. She holds her own with Juliette, and gives us an original character with a lot of confidence and mystery. For example, the longer scenes on the train near the beginning. She is quite authoritative though with a much different style than Juliette, but it all works beautifully. You must be very proud that she won the Cesar.
I have always been very fond of her. I had seen her in a couple of Twilight movies, but I remember seeing her in Into the Wild where she had a very striking part and also a small role in On the Road. I also really liked her in The Runaways. I have always felt that she has a range, and a kind of rebellion. It is personal for her. She is very tough because she grew up in this business, and you need that kind of strength and energy to survive. But I think she is a much more complex individual than how people tend to see her. It has been extremely beautiful and satisfying to se her grow and adapt. I am sure she loved the part and was happy for us to work together, but I think she was really attracted to Juliette and her style of acting; this very free-spirited approach to the work, and how Juliette has managed to become sort of independent and how watching her we feel that she is reinventing the part in whichever film she appears. So I think that fascinated her and she wanted to learn from Juliette. And I also think that Juliette did not want to let her down and disappoint her.
So I think a lot of the energy in the film is about this relationship between them, because I think Kristen learned a lot from Juliette, also in the senses of spontaneity and improvisation. Juliette needs to work at this—she is a working actor who tends to think a lot about it, saying the words a million times until she nails it, and she needs a lot of takes. Kristen is the absolute opposite. She is the ultimate spontaneous actress. She is great on the first take, and it is interesting because she knows this, so she sometimes loses confidence when we have to do things a million times because she thinks she has given everything at the beginning. So I think a lot of what I had to do was give her confidence about different takes. We were doing some very long, complex shots and it was about making something happen. Sometimes that can be done on the first take, but often it takes awhile to when everyone gets a bit looser until something unexpected happens. But I think she is amazing. It was such a pleasure to work with her and I am so proud of her work.
We’ve talked about the self-reflexive dimensions in the narrative, and I believe some of this must be personal for you as well. I also detected a bit of Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant throughout.
I love Fassbinder. He’s a genius! And it was in the back of my mind as I started writing and was trying to figure out how to tell this story. In imagining what type of play the two women would be rehearsing, which needed to incorporate both older and younger women, I thought of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant as a reference point, and initially I thought of using actual scenes, so I tried it and it just did not fit. But then somehow I decided I could write my own version of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and somehow in a very compact, condensed way I was able to tell the whole story in only about four scenes!
Your films have often discussed the issue of globalization, whether the film business in Irma Vep, the dividing of a family in Summer Hours or the cutthroat international business intrigues of Demonlover. I’d like to hear your thoughts on the current movie landscape and Hollywood’s global domination with blockbuster franchise products.
It’s a very big topic, and a complex one. Ultimately like all things having to do with globalization, it works on disastrous but also fascinating levels. Part of this has to do with how movies today travel; you have an instant connection and can dialogue with a movie. For example, think about movies made in Asia. It used to be that no one was that aware that they were actually making many movies in Asia, but now it has become a very important part of the film industry and history. And we get those movies instantly! So when you are a Chinese filmmaker in some provincial town, if you make some great work it will be seen all over the world. It has so much potential and you are not marginalized aesthetically or intellectually. So I think this is something that has to do with a very basic, obvious fact, which is that information travels at the speed of light. People move and travel much more than they ever did and you have some international circuitry related to movies that has grown into something great.
The bad side of this is the standardization of Hollywood movies, and that’s something that is also happening inside the indie world. In Hollywood you have a certain percentage of greatness and great films as well as some brilliant filmmakers. But a lot of what is going on is becoming more and more conventional because it is trying to adapt to a globalized audience. And the globalized audience reacts to the most basic, lowest common denominator. So you have many movies that are really made by the numbers, which are meant to provoke Pavlovian reactions in an American crowd, a Filipino crowd, a Spanish crowd or Russian crowd. They go to the most basic, which is not a good thing because art is about doing things where you take some chances, try things and attempt things that have not been done before. I think we could discuss this for hours, but in the end there are good and bad sides to it.
