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Olivier Assayas has made a career out of the norm, creating films that combine a variety of genres into a unique experience, delving primarily into what drives our inner desires. With BOARDING GATE however, Assayas wanted to make a straight thriller with what he had around him. Mainly, minimal locations in two countries and the talents of two extraordinary actors leading the charge. From DEMONLOVER to CLEAN to IRMA VEP, the French auteur has proven to be one of the most versatile and complex minds in cinema today. To promote his latest film, BOARDING GATE, Assayas took part in a discussion that the Crypt was a part of and gave an in depth look into his unique process in directing and the status of independent filmmaking.
Do you think of yourself as making a shift into exploring new genres or do you feel you offer a new take on these genres? OLIVIER ASSAYAS: In way or another, I suppose that BOARDING GATE is the one that goes all the way. It’s completely English language, where I usually mixed genres and cultures, in this one I kind of mix cultures still but in my previous movies they had genre elements but none of them I would define as straightforward genre. I was playing with elements because I suppose it’s the way I’ve been writing. With this one, it’s as straightforward as I could get. But the roots of this can be seen in DEMONLOVER? OA: Oh yes, completely. I would say a couple of times I read from people who say that DEMONLOVER, CLEAN, and BOARDING GATE are a trilogy. I suppose it happened without my knowledge, but it’s kind of a trilogy I suppose. I think there has been some kind of coherent connection of dialogue between those three movies. How did you go about casting Asia Argento in the main role? OA: To me she’s been the starting point of this film in many ways, not in the sense that I strictly wrote the film for her. This was a movie I had wanted in a way or another to make for quite a while now but I felt I did not have the right actress for the film. It’s a specific take on the genre that works if you have the right person in the middle who is at ease and is completely comfortable with both sides of it, one side is being full of complex emotions of someone who is sexy but has this broken thing about her where you are attracted to her but care for her also and she could be at ease dealing with her emotions while at the same time she can be running around with a gun. There are very few actresses who have that range and I did not know Asia. I was like many people who had a notion of her which was kind of exaggerating. To me she was some kind of an extravagant, Rock N Roll type. I bumped into her and she’s just a very nice person, very smart, very free spirited and we hit it off instantly. We liked the same things. She’s Italian and my father is Italian. Her culture is music and it’s like half music, half cinema, same for me. She has her foot in different film cultures. She is the daughter of one of the geniuses of modern cinema. It’s not that often that you meet someone and feel that if you don’t make a movie with that person, than you are missing something. There’s something that she can help me get out of my system, things that no other actress would. I wrote the film from that point of view thinking that if we could work together, I could use things that she does not show in movies. People either use her completely on one side or completely on the other, but never within the framework where she could be different, we she could show the range of her art, and to me the whole evolution of the film was taking a stereotype of herself and making her at the end of the film just a human being, make it with all the emotions you could relate to. This film was done at a quicker pace than your normal films. How quickly from conception to post did you make this film? OA: It’s a process similar to when I made IRMA VEP in a sense that I had a couple of projects that I wanted to get off the ground that were specifically French. After DEMONLOVER and CLEAN, I wanted to make a film that was closer to my roots in French cinema. I wrote two screenplays and none of them were happening. It was a very bad time for the French film industry and for French independent cinema. CLEAN did extremely well in France, it was my biggest hit I suppose. Then people perceived me as an international filmmaker who does not need financing in France, so all of a sudden I had no international backing at all. In France, it was very difficult to make my films so I was stuck in the middle. I met Asia because she was going to be involved in one of those projects. Because the other project was stalling, I wrote BOARDING GATE during a summer. We were supposed to shoot in the fall of 2006 and then I changed producers because the guy who was supposed to finance this film had no idea how to put it together. It’s difficult to get financing for this film because it wasn’t specifically a French film. At that point I thought the film was not happening. Asia thought the film was not happening so she did another film. I had to wait a couple of months before she was through with whatever she was doing, so the process of writing, producing, and shooting was delayed by two months because we had to wait for her to become available again. How was it shooting in Hong Kong because it has a documentary feel to it particularly the scenes on the street? OA: To me the whole point is that’s exactly what I wanted. I love the town, I’m familiar with it, and I’ve spent time there. I knew that Hong Kong crews function differently from Western crews. When you bring your Western crew to Hong Kong, it is complex logistics and everything costs three or four times the price. When it’s a Hong Kong crew, things work really fast and you don’t have to worry about union rules. What was exciting for me in Hong Kong was to film documentary style. It’s not exactly true because a lot of the stuff is a little staged but I wanted a mixture of things that were made in the energy that you had in Hong Kong movies and I wanted to be in the street with three or four crew members. My choice was only to bring only five French technicians. My core crew was me and the rest were Chinese. The problem I had was that there were too many people. The Hong Kong crew work really fast but they work for very little money but you have literally a million people with you. It felt like a million people. When we were shooting in a street with a hidden camera, my problem was what am I going to do with a crew so I had to invent strategies to get rid of the crew. So you don’t have that much time to rehearse? OA: No but I never rehearse but I shoot a lot. I do takes over and over again but we didn’t have time for much, we shot the film in six weeks. Why don’t you believe in rehearsals? OA: Because I think it spoils the spontaneity of the acting. I think there’s a rawness, there’s something in the first time you have an actor saying a line in costume, on the set, in camera, something special happens. Even if he’s rehearsed in front of a mirror in his bathroom, it’s completely different. It’s a moment where the actor lives the situation. Even the second take is already different. The second take, he already remembers the noise of the line. By the second take, the actor thinks “What was right in the first take, what can I do better,” and all of a sudden this conscious process that starts which could lead you somewhere. It takes a while but by the tenth take it gets back to a free flowing spontaneity. The whole point to me is preserving the energy of the first take. You have a love of ambiguity. You don’t like to tie up everything or fill in the loose ends, so what is your fascination with ambiguity? OA: It’s the way I write and the way I think. It has to do with the pleasure I have in the audience. I like to have the type of relationship in a movie where some doors are left open for me. I like entering a film and filling holes, filling gaps and so forth. The space between two scenes, what happens in the middle of the cut? It’s something you either fill in with conventions or you fill in with something weirder so you put off balance the relationship between one scene to the other because you have to figure out how the character moved from point A to point B. You have some viewers who feel bad about it, they feel off balanced, but some other viewers will realize that here is some space to appropriate the film, to invent your own way of threading things together. Ultimately it has to do with the relationship I have with actors. I never tell my actors, “Do this, do that, do it this way, this is the strength of the scene so do it this way.” I go, “These are the lines, this is the set, this is the shot, and let’s see where we go from there.” I don’t get that indication of the psychology of the character, I just see what happens. Eventually I leave the door open to have things go slightly off whatever I had in mind in the first place. In the end I find it more real because the scene becomes a collaboration between myself and the actor. I kind of invent the situation, but the actor who actually lives the situation takes it to where his own sensibilities take him. Do you have the loose ends filled up in your head? OA: Yes of course but I don’t think it’s interesting. I think the solution is much less interesting than the question mark. I think my solution is less interesting than the solution that the actors and the crew takes us when we are shooting. There is something more real, more complex, more true of the solution. Why did you decide on Michael Madsen for the role of Miles because with his physical presence and if it was a different actor, it would’ve gone in a totally different direction? OA: It’s interesting because I just had lunch with Michael and he has asked me this question probably five times, but he asked “Olivier, why did you choose me out of all these actors,” and I said to him that I love his work and it’s something he has to be instinctive about it. Usually when I make a French film, I work with actors I’m familiar with. I’ve met them and I’ve had drinks with them. We have friends in common. They are just part of my world so I have some kind of notion of what kind of person they are. When I am working with Nick Nolte or when I am working with Michael that means that I am working with someone I’ve never met so it’s just my instinct of their work. I think it’s a certain level of freedom they have, an independence they have towards the system. Nick is someone who’s completely independent from the system, so is Michael. It’s something you can sense from their choices on their projects. I also wanted Miles to be very physical, someone who has a very powerful physical presence that is both animal in that sense in sexiness and attraction but at the same time can be scary. In front of Asia, you need to have that kind of character because otherwise Asia just swallows him up and spits him out. She’s tough and I needed to put someone in front of Asia that she could be intimidated by but also give her a fight. What did Michael put into it that you never saw in the character? OA: He brought a lot. Michael is a very instinctive actor and some actors are instinctive but they can go off in another direction. Michael doesn’t really know how not to be instinctive. He won’t do a thing in a way or another that does not ring true to him. It has to be real and he is not afraid of asking you the most extravagant questions about specifics because it’s not that he does not what to do what you are asking of him. There’s something in him that says “I’m not getting this but I need to get this to do it right.” I think the mixture of instinct, power, and also seduction that he has. He’s such a nice person. He can be scary but at the same time you can’t help but like him because he has that thing in him. Talk about ambiguity. He has the most ambiguous screen presence. He has it in him. Every single part that Michael has done has that kind of quality. It’s not like I invented it, his presence is about that. What do you think about independent filmmaking today? OA: What do I think of independent filmmaking? It’s the same thing I think about the state of world cinema. I think there’s a lot of great filmmaking going on in many different cultures and countries. The problem is the system and the logic of it. I’m not familiar with how it works in America but in France I know exactly how it goes and I think that the gap between independent cinema and mainstream isn’t so much the issue of working within or without the system. It’s the issue or working within or without younger audiences. When you make films, it’s kind of scary and then you realize you’re addressing an audience that is aging. The art house audience in Europe is getting more conventional, more conservative. The kids go for the mainstream movies. They watch the Hollywood films and the French comedies and very little else, and that’s kind of scary. I think that it’s an issue that independent cinema should take into consideration because the real audience of cinema is the young people. The people who watch the movies, relate to the movies, are between 15-25. After that they have jobs and kids. They watch TV or videos or Youtube. What are you doing next? OA: The new film is opening in France in a few weeks. What is it? OA: It’s a film with Juliette Binoche and Charles Berling. It’s my most French film to date (laughs). It’s called SUMMER HOURS. Thank you Olivier and good luck with BOARDING GATE. OA: You’re welcome. (Special thanks to Jessica Uzzan and Jeff Hill at Int'l House of Publicity)
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