Interview: Olivier Assayas on "Irma Vep" and beyond

Tomorrow, Zeitgeist releases a new, improved domest­ic DVD of Olivier Assayas’  1996 Irma Vep, an exhil­ar­at­ing, some­times acid com­edy about movies and movie­mak­ing, in which Hong Kong super­star Maggie Cheung stars as…Maggie Cheung. She’s in France to make a “mod­ern” ver­sion of Louis Feuillade’s sem­in­al silent crime seri­al Les Vampires, to be helmed by a very fraught dir­ect­or played by Jean-Pierre Leaud. I’ve already writ­ten here about how, to my mind, Vep fits into a line of films that includes Truffaut’s La Nuit Americaine (Day For Night) and Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore, and as you’ll see below Assayas has some very def­in­ite ideas on that per­ceived con­tinu­ity himself. 

One of the issues I had was how,
at that time main­stream com­mer­cial French film mak­ing was begin­ning to use
whatever they saw in Hong Kong film mak­ing as the basis for some kind of French
genre film mak­ing.  And I kind of
resen­ted it at that time, for silly reas­ons that had to do with the fact that I
was involved in ini­tially import­ing Hong Kong film mak­ing and I loved Hong Kong
film mak­ing on the basis that, behind the action, the fast cut­ting and so on
and so forth, there was some­thing deep­er that had to do with the spe­cif­ics of
Asian vis­ion of the world.  I mean
Asian, Chinese poetry, Chinese paint­ing and so on and so forth.  And all of a sud­den I just felt that
there were these guys who just only loved the sex and viol­ence thing and kind
of did not under­stand the com­plex­it­ies of wherever that was com­ing from.  So I was mak­ing fun of them, but it was
also polem­ic­al in some ways.

And it’s every­where in French film
now.  They are using Chinese
mar­tial art experts to cho­reo­graph their action scenes and so on and so
forth.  And ulti­mately they ended
up build­ing some kind of French genre film mak­ing, which frankly—it’s not that
I’m fond or not fond of it.  I’m
not par­tic­u­larly con­cerned with it. 
So some­how, you know…I sup­pose that mak­ing a state­ment against it was a
lost cause in the first place.

SCR: The film­makers  you’re speak­ing of are willfully
ignor­ing the cul­tur­al spe­cificity of Hong Kong cinema, gentri­fy­ing it…

ASSAYAS:  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes,
abso­lutely.  Which, you know, it’s
a pro­cess that you know that ulti­mately is also not spe­cif­ic to French
film­mak­ing.  Whatever it was that
was hap­pen­ing with­in Hong Kong genre film mak­ing has been absorbed by film
mak­ing all over the world, includ­ing in the States, of course.

SCR: A lot of accounts of Irma Vep
see writers describ­ing Rene Vidal, the char­ac­ter played by Jean-Pierre Leaud,
as a washed-up “nou­velle vague” dir­ect­or. 
But nobody ever actu­ally uses the phrase “nou­velle vague” in the film’s
dia­logue, if I recall cor­rectly. 

ASSAYAS:  No.  No.  Of course not. 

SCR: The cast­ing of Lou Castel as
the dir­ect­or who usurps Vidal is inter­est­ing. Both Leaud and Castel starred in
two very fre­quently cited films about film mak­ing, Truffaut’s La Nuit amer­i­caine and Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore.

ASSAYAS: When I was writ­ing Irma
Vep, Beware of the Holy Whore was a very import­ant ref­er­ence in many ways. At
that time I felt that the one movie about mod­ern film mak­ing was Beware of the
Holy Whore.  Much more than La nuit
Americaine which is a movie I love. 
I just wor­ship Truffaut. 
But for me, La nuit Americaine is a movie that deals with the fantasy
Truffaut had of cinema when he was a child. It’s a movie about how he dreamt
that movies were made when he was a teen­ager or some­thing.  But it has very little to do with
mod­ern film mak­ing.  Whereas in the
mod­ern inde­pend­ent film mak­ing where Beware of a Holy Whore is pretty much
it, you know; it was the blue­print for [Wenders’] State of Things. It’s a movie
that was much more present for me at that time than La nuit Americaine which
is the film Irma Vep is always com­pared to.  But I think it’s very misleading.

Vidal being described as
washed-out nou­velle vague film maker; well, you know, he has his own problems
but he is ulti­mately  kind of
right.  He gets made fun of him during
the whole film because he’s kind of a cari­ca­ture of depress­ive French film
artist.  But then you real­ize in
the end that he was ask­ing the right ques­tions.  And not only he was ask­ing the right ques­tions, he was asking
like meta­phys­ic­al ques­tions about cinema. And he does man­age in his own way to
make some kind of mod­ern ver­sion of whatever we fig­ure out he was dealing
with.  So in that sense I always
saw Irma Vep as a movie with a happy end­ing. 

SCR: I saw the Truffaut film as
being kind of about movie mak­ing as a micro­cosm for actu­al life.  And when the star arrives, she’s kind
of absorbed into this com­munity, where­as Maggie in Irma Vep rep­res­ents a kind
of desire. Even though she’s greeted with some­what amused indif­fer­ence when she
first arrives at the office, from then on she becomes the object of desire for
the vari­ous characters.

ASSAYAS:  Yes. 
Absolutely. And there are two lay­ers to it.  For me, Irma Vep is very much a movie about grace, you know,
like how grace can enlight­en film mak­ing mira­cu­lously once in a while.  And it’s some­thing that is both there
and not there, vis­ible and invis­ible. 
And I think that whatever magic the char­ac­ter of Maggie has, is
some­thing that some char­ac­ters see and some char­ac­ters don’t see.  And it’s a game that is also played
with the audi­ence because the audi­ence is part of it.  The audi­ence can see or not see the grace of the character
of Maggie.  And it’s how that the
mys­tery of it kind of cir­cu­lates, you know, in all the dif­fer­ent lay­ers of the
film.  So that’s one part of
it.  And the oth­er part of it, is
that Irma Vep deals with some­thing that La Nuit Americaine does­n’t deal with,
which is basic­ally what exactly is being filmed.  You know, like Meet Pamela in Day for Night is…you don’t
want to see that film.  It looks
very dull and it’s not the issue. 
Or you know. like in Abel Ferrara’s movie about cinema, is that Snake
Eyes–

SCR:  Snake Eyes, yeah. 
I think it was released as Dangerous Game…

ASSAYAS: I kind of like the
film.  It’s also a very interesting
film about film mak­ing.  But the
movie they’re shoot­ing, Mother of Mirrors, it’s like some kind of nightmare
film, you don’t want to see that. Snake Eyes itself is a much bet­ter film.

But in Irma Vep I just somehow
wanted to cre­ate a work of art with­in the work of art that was worth it, that
had its own strength, that was kind of 
worthy of the hopes you have for whatever those char­ac­ters are working
on.

Cheung being inter­viewed by Assayas on the Vep set. 

SCR:  And it’s inter­est­ing hav­ing Maggie Cheung play a character
named Maggie Cheung, who’s obvi­ously not neces­sar­ily the per­son Maggie
Cheung.  You get her into these
sort of mor­al gray areas and then there are cer­tain times when she’s dealing
with the atten­tions of [the char­ac­ter] Zoe or react­ing to the atten­tions of Zoe where you’re
not sure if she’s being disin­genu­ous or not; or all sorts of things, which
likely has very little to do with her as an actu­al per­son necessarily.

ASSAYAS:  It was very import­ant that Maggie was called Maggie in the
film, because part of it was not her, but part of it could be her in a
way.  I mean in Irma Vep she’s this
kind of fish out of water; she’s in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent envir­on­ment, and she
does­n’t speak the lan­guage and people ask her weird ques­tions and she’s trying
to fig­ure out what’s going on. 
Which is pretty much what was hap­pen­ing with Maggie on the set.  Hopefully she had a more inter­est­ing or
sat­is­fy­ing time on our set than the one depic­ted in the film!  But I mean she her­self used that in her
work. I think for her it was the first time that she did­n’t do her home­work, as
it were; she did not work on the scenes pre­vi­ously to the shoot and working
out, “OK, this is how I’m going to do it and I’m going to go in this direction
and that dir­ec­tion.”  There were
many scenes where basic­ally she kind of let her­self go.  She accep­ted the notion that she could
react to the situ­ations as they happened. 
So there are spe­cif­ic moments in the film where she’s actu­ally being
Maggie. Which gets us in a very com­plex thing of when are you see­ing the actor,
when are you see­ing the char­ac­ter, when are you see­ing both, and you know and
what’s the real per­son in this whole game? 

When I wrote the screen­play I was
using anoth­er name for the char­ac­ter. 
But the moment I knew Maggie was doing the film, it was very important
that Maggie could be Maggie and I could use  clips of Maggie’s films with­in the film and so on and so
forth. 

SCR:  It occurs to me that you also deal with her per­sona to a
cer­tain extent in Clean, even though she’s play­ing a char­ac­ter com­pletely not
her­self.  There seems a similar
tack to which you deal with Asia Argento’s per­sona in the work in Boarding
Gate.

ASSAYAS:  In both films, I mean both Clean and Boarding Gate, I
sup­pose I’m play­ing with the dual­ity. 
I’m play­ing with the idea we have of a spe­cif­ic act­ress via her persona
and the per­son she actu­ally is. In both films I start with some kind of fantasy
we can have of a movie star. Take the kind of notion we have, for instance, of
Asia.  And I start with that and
kind of strip her until I kind of get to the core of the per­son at the
end.  Somehow at the end of
Boarding Gate, it’s not about the idea we have of Asia Argento, but basically
the raw human being behind the mask. 
And some­how it’s more or less the same story in Clean.

SCR: In Boarding Gate, the very
first con­front­a­tion between Asia’s char­ac­ter and Michael Madsen’s
character—that dia­logue, the back and forth between them is in some respects
almost a cri­tique of the rela­tion­ship between an act­or and a director.

ASSAYAS: In some ways.  But it’s also about the ambiguities
between love, desire and how, I don’t know, just some­how indi­vidu­als get lost
in the com­plex­it­ies of their own desires and the con­tra­dic­tions of their own
desires. 

Michael Madsen and Asia Argento, Boarding Gate, Assayas, 2007

SCR:  I’m told you’re in the middle of scout­ing loc­a­tions, and you
were recently in Lebanon.

ASSAYAS: Yes, I was in
Lebanon.  I was in Syria, I was in
Sudan and Yemen, which is all places where we might shoot.  Damascus is the least likely but the
oth­ers are places where we might shoot a film.

SCR:  Which pro­ject is this?

ASSAYAS:  It’s com­plex. 
It’s based on the story of Carlos, Carlos the Jackal, the
ter­ror­ist.  And it’s 20 years of
his life, between 1974 and ’94.  It
starts with his first oper­a­tion in London and it ends when he’s arres­ted by the
French police in Khartoum in Sudan. 
It’s going to be like three fea­ture length films for French pay TV.  And there will be I sup­pose a shorter
ver­sion that will be the inter­na­tion­al movie ver­sion of it. Although at this
point it’s not exactly clear what shape or form we’ll have the film ver­sion.  It might turn into 2 films.

SCR: We’ve heard also of a
con­tinu­ation of your char­ac­ters from Summer Hours, called Les Temps de Venir?

ASSAYAS: No, that’s–

SCR:  That’s a myth?

ASSAYAS: Yeah, totally.

SCR:  I figured as much. 

ASSAYAS:  That’s not in the plan. 

SCR:  Sounded kind of improb­able.  What brought you to the Carlos project?

ASSAYAS:  Well it was this pro­du­cer who came to me say­ing, “Are you
inter­ested in doing the story of Carlos?” 
And he had these four pages that were dread­ful.  I looked into it and I thought, well,
this is not very excit­ing.  But all
of a sud­den, it made me think about Carlos, and I asked this pro­du­cer if he had
a bio­graphy of the man.  So I read
it and I thought there was some­thing kind of fas­cin­at­ing in terms of that
peri­od, in terms of some kind of mod­ern adven­ture.  And I was kind of amazed that no one really dealt with it
because it’s pretty extraordin­ary. 
And the sub­ject mat­ter is kind of addict­ive.  So I star­ted writ­ing and writ­ing and writ­ing and it got just
like absurdly long.  So we had to
find ways of just shap­ing it so that it could be made. As it turns out I’m
doing it with an incred­ible level of free­dom. I had no pres­sure on the
loc­a­tions, cast, nar­ra­tion, whatever. 
So it’s a very excit­ing film to make, I must say.

SCR:  Seems that people are begin­ning to look back at that era and
its vari­ous mani­fest­a­tions of ter­ror­ism a bit more these days.  Barbet Schroder did a doc­u­ment­ary on
Jacques Verges, who was Carlos’s law­yer, among oth­er things, and there’s a
recent German fea­ture film about Baader-Meinhof…

ASSAYAS: I sup­pose that enough
time has passed and all of a sud­den people can just look back on that time
without it being so prob­lem­at­ic or dan­ger­ous to treat in a film. I’m kind of amazed I have the
kind of budget I have to make the story of Carlos in France.  I thought that it would be completely
taboo, that it would be just too rad­ic­al for some­thing like French TV.  And all of a sud­den, I don’t know,
there’s like a crack in the system.

I’ve been learn­ing a lot in
pre­par­ing the film. The research I did, it’s huge. It got me to areas I never
really explored before.

SCR:  Will you be shoot­ing on Super 16, 35 or digital?

ASSAYAS:  We’ll be shoot­ing mostly super 16 but I think we will mix
the tex­tures.  Some of it will be
in 35, most of it in super 16.  We
might do some stuff also on DV, I mean depend­ing on the loc­a­tion.  I prefer film. With this pic­ture, it’s
so long and so com­plex and because I’m using also peri­od foot­age, so you know I
have to mix everything, so it’s much easi­er to shoot it super 16 and then go to
some digit­al post pro­duc­tion to mix all the ele­ments.  But oth­er­wise, you know, I think that 35 is just my medium.
I need film.  I prefer film.  I’m not a digit­al person.

SCR:  Well, to get back to Irma Vep, I don’t know if you’d
neces­sar­ily cat­egor­ize things that way, but look­ing back on your work since
then, where do you think it fits and how do you look at it?  Obviously it was some­thing that had a
big impact on your per­son­al life as well as your pro­fes­sion­al life.

ASSAYAS:  Yes, well yes, it def­in­itely had.  It def­in­itely had.

I sup­pose that the sup­port the
film had in the States and the way it was kind of suc­cess­ful in its own way in
the States, in England, in Australia, com­pared to France, where people were
very sus­pi­cious of the film when it was first released. That was significant.
The film did not do well in France. 
But gradu­ally the film got this kind of cult status, includ­ing in
France, where now all of a sud­den every­body seems to have for­got­ten that it was
not that well received. 

And to me it’s deeply con­nec­ted to
Cold Water, which is the film I did right before that.  And it’s two movies I shot in super 16,
4 weeks, no money.  And you know it
just gave me some kind of extraordin­ary free­dom, because I just stayed with the
notion that I don’t need money to make films.  And I can be kind of rad­ic­al in my choices, because I know
that worse comes to worse, I still would be able to make that film in that
format, which gives you a lot of con­fid­ence obvi­ously.  And bey­ond that, Irma Vep just gave me
some con­fid­ence that you can get away with a lot in terms of film mak­ing.  When I wrote the film I thought, oh my
God, I will nev­er get away with this, it’s too weird.  And then, you know, people did relate to it.  So it was kind of unexpected.