On the third day of the 23rd Shanghai International Film Festival, another international film master Olivier Assayas, the famous French director and screenwriter, gave a lecture in the Master Class through video connection.
Different from other directors with professional training background, Assayas made his debut as a film critic. In 1986, at the age of 31, he directed his first fiction feature film, and rose to be among the new French directors in the 1990s. In 2004, the film Clean directed by Assayas put Maggie Cheung on the throne of the best actress at Cannes. In 2011, he served as a judge at the 64th Cannes Film Festival. In 2012, he won the Best Screenplay Award at the 69th Venice International Film Festival for the movie Après mai (Something in the Air). In 2016, he won the Best Director Award at the 69th Cannes Film Festival for his film Personal Shopper. Assayas also has made a superlative study of Chinese-language movies. As early as 1997, he directed HHH: A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, a documentary about the Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Precisely because of his special experience, when invited to give some advice to current film majors, Assayas said without hesitation: "My advice is to follow your own feelings, rather than the rules your school teaches you. Do not follow other people’s suggestions. More importantly, you have to find out the inner truth. You can learn something in school, but how to be yourself can only be explored by yourself."
Walk out of classrooms to learn in life
Olivier Assayas’ father was a screenwriter of the older generation in France. In his childhood, many filmmakers came and went to his home and film creation was very close to young Assayas, but Assayas said that he didn’t like his father’s film works, "I never thought my father and his friends were cool."
In those years, oil painting and drawing were young Assayas’ favorite art forms. He chose literature as his major during college and at the same time he was studying oil painting. After graduation, his film dream began to sprout, but his father reminded him that the French film industry has a strict hierarchy. To make a film, one must start with a crew assistant. This conservative suggestion was directly rejected by Assayas, "I don’t want to be an assistant. I don’t think I will be a good assistant, so I started to make some short films. I haven’t gone to any film school, but I think it is not difficult to learn knowledge about filmmaking. I learned it in 5 months. I think it’s better to learn from the real life.”
While making short films, the famous French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma invited him to write a film review. Assayas worked for the magazine for several years, which offered him opportunities to interview film workers he admired, "I always think that writing for this magazine is the best film school for me." The Cahiers du Cinéma often publishes special issues. When planning a special issue on Hong Kong films, Assayas traveled to Hong Kong for the first time and lived there for more than a month, where he learned about the Chinese-language movies in an all-round way for the first time.
Then Assayas met filmmakers such as Chen Guofu, Yang Dechang, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Du Kefeng. "Meeting them is too important for me. They are a little older than me, but they are like-minded to me, and they taught me how to see the world. That journey was very important to me in those days when my characteristics as a director was formed. I have always been very interested in Chinese-language action movies. I think the physical beauty of fighting scenes and fencing scenes, the beauty, strength and speed of the movement are very beautiful. It has a great impact on me and my vision performance.”
Enjoy the loneliness and concentration of being a novelist director
Because of his writing background, Olivier Assayas served as screenwriter for all the films he directed. He thinks this is very important for his work as a director. “I don\'t really like the collaboration between director and screenwriter. In my opinion, it’s too restrictive.”
Assayas believed, “being a screenwriter made me feel like a novelist; and I was already a director in screenwriting.” He introduced that “I was used to write an outline first, and set up the film frame, even if the frame was still shaky. When I was writing the script, I was already thinking about what kind of role I should choose, how to set the scene, and how to deliver the lines. In fact, being a screenwriter and being a director are both the process of creation and writing.”
The process of creation is also a process of self-excavation and self-awareness for an artist. After the outline is completed, Assayas often spends a long time figuring out and balancing the rhythm of the script. “I really enjoy the loneliness and concentration of being a screenwriter. I think that being a screenwriter gives me an opportunity to introspect, which improves my movies."
Leave the rhythm of film to actors
In the film Personal Shopper, which won the Best Director Award for Olivier Assayas at the Cannes Film Festival, the girl Maureen, played by the “Twilight Girl” Kristen Stewart, has been waiting for his deceased twin brother contacted her as they had agreed, and her mobile phone began to receive some strange anonymous messages. The scene of Kristen acting with the mobile phone impressed the audience deeply. It is also a typical case of transforming script text into the art of sound and picture.
” Regarding Kristen’s acting skills, Olivier Assayas praised: “I think this is the most complicated scene I have ever filmed in the process of directing. Kristen’s performance is very expressive and I have decided to let her play that role when I was writing the script. She is very in-depth and devoted to the character creation. She is one of the most outstanding actors I know. When filming the Personal Shopper, I am the external director while she is the internal director.”
Olivier Assayas said that he is not an “exquisite” screenwriter and director. In his opinion, the script he wrote is more like a stage script of a drama, and does not describe the psychology of the characters in particular. He believes that film shooting to a large extent depends on the interaction between the actors on the scene, and between the actors and the crew. “I will give the actors enough time, not to let them play completely free, but to enable them to recreate. Often the rhythm of my movies is done by actors. I will interrupt them and ask them to react if find that the pace is wrong, or the interaction between characters is wrong. But this rarely happens. Once the actors go in the characters and understand the script, they know more about the characters than I do.”