Thanks to the French newspaper Le Monde, and that here in Argentina reproduces Clarín, you can enjoy one of the most interesting filmmakers of current French cinema.
Olivier Assayas has a long film career. At 54, he talks about his latest movie Summer hours, a family drama, starring the great Juliette Binoche and Charles Berling, centered on the disputes between three brothers over an inheritance left by their mother.
And it also takes time to think about the current state of the cinema is his country, his admired colleagues and independence in the cinema, and how he faces his next projects.
Then lfull interview:
Why did you choose that topic? What is the link with your own story?
From the moment in which we speak of family, of a change of generation, the intimate but also something universal is touched. I think all of us, at some point, are forced to confront it. I feel like I didn't reason out the need for the movie. It was imposed on me. Without a doubt, for personal reasons, but also because I thought that those personal reasons allowed me to articulate something universal, much broader than an intimate problem.
In art one must try to find the question the artist asks himself when creating. What is your question here?
He asked me several questions, which materialized in each of the characters. I get the impression that each one represents a question and a facet of me. I believe that art is made up of questions; the answers, let each one find them.
Why did you put "The hours of summer"?
Originally, it had another title, which was Souvenir du Valois, which is the subtitle for Sylvie, by Gérard de Nerval. He had chosen it because it linked the story to the countryside north of Paris. But it seemed to me that it was very much towards a nostalgia type yellowed album sheets and I wanted something that was closer to what the film tells, that is, a relationship with the passage of time, but more with a sense linked to the future, with a more positive idea. And this title fit the best.
Do you intend to do the fall, winter and spring hours?
I could do like Rohmer, the cycle of the seasons, but no, it does not figure in my projects, despite my admiration for Rohmer.
In a Parisian theater I heard a guy say that his latest film is a "filthy bourgeois comedy" and I don't share his opinion. What would you answer?
What makes me sad at this moment is the way in which the representation of the bourgeoisie and the representation of an artistic medium are confused. The house of the characters in Las horas… is not bourgeois, it does not have its heaviness or its formalism. It is a house that belonged to an artist, a painter, which is mixed with nature, and where one has the impression that time stopped half a century ago. I do not see how it can resemble the houses of the current bourgeoisie. If we prohibit the representation of a world that is basically modest but inhabited by a beauty linked to our history, to our culture, we are closing the door to many things in French cinema.
Are you interested in what your colleagues do. How do you see current French cinema?
I have a deep love for French independent cinema, which produces exciting works every year. I could take a thousand examples, from the films of directors like Claire Denis, Arnaud Desplechin, Catherine Breillat, to take those who have traveled a path parallel to mine.
The diversity of topics and genres that it addresses is surprising. What motivates you? Is it necessary in each project to do something that has never been done before?
I impose myself to do something never done, for me at least. I have the impression that the path that is made in the cinema is both a path of discovery of the world and a kind of personal revelation. I have the impression of discovering, through the exploration of the world, aspects of my work that are revealed to me. It gives me the feeling of having made a fairly coherent set of films. That oscillate between the past and the present, the intimate and the universal, the local and the global. But where everything, deep down, could cohabit in the same way that it inhabits our lives. My impression is that we have all these dimensions in us, and it is true that few works in the cinema attempt to articulate them.
Source: Clarin