Vamping wtih Olivier Assayas
November 24, 2008

Filmmaker Olivier Assayas always has time to talk about Irma Vep, his 1996 film about a French moviemaker (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who embarks on a remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1915 silent serial Les Vampires (which concerns a cabal of Parisian cat thieves). For his leading lady in the epic, he chooses Hong Kong action heroine Maggie Cheung, a distinctly non-French presence, whom he feels can bring a natural depth to the action-flavored production. Zeitgeist is re-issuing Irma Vep as a special edition DVD on December 9.

“There are movies that have their own lives, and that is Irma Vep,” Assayas told me in a recent phone interview. “It’s really interesting how it sticks around and pops up, here and there. It always comes back to me in one way

A popular arthouse selection when it was first released theatrically Stateside more than a decade ago, Irma Vep is the film that gave Assayas auteur cred on this side of the Atlantic. In fact, according to Assayas, the affectionate and at times fantastical love letter to the art of filmmaking, generated more positive attention here than it did in its native France.

“I could sense that people in America related to the film,” Assayas remembered. “In France, it was different--the press was good, but they were suspicious. ‘Should we take this seriously?’ they thought. It works differently in different countries.”

Since Irma (an anagram of “vampire,” in case you didn’t notice), Assayas has gone on to write and direct such respected arthouse fare as Late August, Early September (1998), Demonlover (2002), and the drama Clean (2004), which also stars Maggie Cheung, to whom Assayas was married for three years until the two divorced in 2001.

Assayas is quick to dispel the idea that his romance with his leading lady began on the set of Irma, though a spark was definitely ignited.

“We knew very little about each other when we were making Irma,” he said. She came a week before the shoot and she left the day after we finished. Our relationship started later. I used her in Irma as an Asian film icon--a cypher--where she played herself. She had an opportunity to loosen up, change her lines and have a sense of freedom.”

“Maggie was extremely happy with the film,’ he quickly added.

Assayas’s most recent film is the thriller Boarding Gate (2007) starring Michael Madsen and Asia Argento. Like Irma Vep, it admiringly plays with an established genre and then gives it a nifty deconstruction. In this case, the film offers Assayas’ take on the kind of direct-to-video genre thrillers that thrived in the Nineties.

“I [attempt] to do things that you’re not supposed to do as an independent European filmmaker, to expand my notion of what I can do on screen,” Assayas said. “There is so much space in movies to invent and try things that have not been done before--you try to connect the wires and not have them blow up in your face.”

Posted by Laurence Lerman on November 24, 2008 | Comments (0)