(Jérémie Renier and Olivier Assayas on the set of Summer Hours. Photo courtesy of Unifrance.)
French director Olivier Assayas’s extraordinary twelfth feature, Summer Hours, stars Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling, Jérémie Renier and Edith Scob.
Light Sensitive: Summer Hours is your first pure French film in almost a decade. Was there a sense of you being pulled back home.
Olivier Assayas: I had wanted to do that for a while. The only reason it didn't happen earlier was the other projects I had fell through. For similar reasons after I did Les destinées sentimentales, I just had this necessity to move onto something else because I felt I went as far as I could. Boarding Gate was a chance to move completely out of the box of whatever French cinema stands for. I just felt I was on the extreme boarder of what could be done or should be done. It was vital to go back to things that bring me back to my background, my history and ultimately an effort to make a kind of autobiographical movie.
This was not exactly an autobiographical movie [in the manner] Cold Water is dealing with a lot of very personal history, in the same way that Late August, Early September also does. In terms of storytelling [Summer Hours] is more in common with my experience. I grew up in the countryside in an old house.
(Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Flight of the Red Balloon. Photo courtesy of Unifrance.)
Light Sensitive: Given your personal connection to Hou Hsiao-hsien and Juliette Binoche, was your project inspired by The Flight of the Red Balloon.
Assayas: Not at all, at least not in that sense. The two films have a completely parallel history. Both films were supposed to be a segment in this Musée d’Orsay 20th anniversary project that ended up not happening. I saw Hou Hsiao-hsien in Paris when this was happening, and we had this discussion. I was telling him that I might be in trouble because this small bit the Musée asked me to do was starting to feel much more like a feature. I thought there was more material, more stuff to it.
I think I'm going to go in the direction of that of a feature. He said, 'That's more or less about the way I feel about my project.' I thought we were both in trouble, but then the Musée d'Orsay project was cancelled. We both had these projects, and we had this Juliette Binoche connection.
Juliette wanted to work with Hou. Gradually, Hou's project became his French Juliette Binoche movie. When I saw Juliette, she said, 'I know you also have a project around the Musée d'Orsay with Hou. I should be a part of it. I should be the connection between the films.’ I said, ‘Great, but there's no big part for you. It's ensemble piece and it's not something I would have offered you.’ She said, 'I don't care, I'll do it.'
Light Sensitive: One of your early scripts, Andre Techine's Rendez-vous [1985], marked Juliette's breakthrough as an actor.
Assayas: I used to have in the back of my head that some day, I should write something for Juliette. I had no idea the collaboration would happen the way it happened. I think it also helped that she enjoyed quite a bit the improvisation she did working with Hou Hsiao-hsien. She wanted to go in that direction. In that sense it was the best timing for me. I love Juliette, but if I had not seen her in Hou's film, I'm not sure I would have wanted her in Summer Hours because the way I was going to work was keeping the actors off-balance. When you're trying to create some kind of reality, you also create some kind of chaos.
Light Sensitive: Summer Hours is your most pastoral film.
Assayas: I made all of my early films with [cinematographer] Denis Lenoir. At some point I started working with Eric Gautier and eventually also with Yorick Le Saux. This one I knew I wanted to do with Eric. We made this on a small budget, so we had to do it very fast. I knew I needed the Eric when we were making Irma Vep. At the same time I also needed the Eric I made Les destinées sentimentales with. I knew it was a movie where light was extremely important. On the set, I'm very impatient. I hate to wait. I'm very happy when I set up a shot, we finish it and we go onto the next one. I just hate it with cameramen who say, 'No, I need five, ten or fifteen minutes to fix this.' Eric is perfect for this kind of film because he knows when he has to be really fast, like ultra fast, and he knows when he should stop because the film needs that specific light at that specific moment.
Light Sensitive: Time is very interesting in the film as well. It's elliptical and fluid, like Cassavetes, the death of the mother, the daughter getting busted, events happen and we're meant to adjust on the fly to the passage of time.
Assayas: That's the way I write. I hate the notion of exposition. I just have to jump right in and hopefully things get clearer just as we move on. Here, the structure of the film was extremely dependent on light. We choose different textures for the different acts, including in terms of treatment of the stock in the lab. (That's also something Eric is great at.) We did this work of changing the colors of the film, extremely desaturated and less and less color and then gradually the color comes back. Ultimately every single part of the movie has its own mood.
Light Sensitive: Is there a way the movie marks a summation of sorts. Parts of the movie feel like fragments from earlier films. The party scene with the kids evokes the party scene in Cold Water.
Assayas: Somehow it comes from something I realized when I've been in the situation of discussing my film. It's in terms of how my films connect with me. One thing that really struck me in a very powerful way is something that happens in the ruins of some kind bourgeois mansion. I started thinking in the back of my mind during the shooting of Les destinées sentimentales, 'This is the ruins of this place where the kids had the party in Cold Water,' which I had made a few years before. I think it's an idea that I articulated in the narration of very particular film, in the sense the kids' party in the same place as the family house and all its ceremonial and habits coming from other times.
Light Sensitive: I really connected the film to Jean Renoir.
Assayas: I think in time the influence of Renoir has been growing. He's always been a filmmaker who was very dear to me. And [Ingmar] Bergman, too, I wouldn't be making films without Bergman. In terms of writing, Bergman has always been my deepest influence. [Assayas is the author of Conversation avec Bergman.]You have other filmmakers that really strike you. When I started making films, I had this big influence of the work of [Robert] Bresson, who for me was the most important thing in cinema. I kind of drifted toward Renoir.
Light Sensitive: Speaking of Bergman, the family dynamics are understated but tangled. The scene where the adult siblings have to determine the future of the estate is heartbreaking because you sense nobody is quite sure how exactly truthful or honest they want to be.
Assayas: It's pretty much the core of the film. No one wants to say what has to be said, but they end up having to say it, so they try to say it as tactfully as they can. What interests me also, when people start screaming at each other and say horrible things, you have all of those traumatic experiences of the past that come up. It's standard, conventional. I wanted to deal with people who were aware of that. They don't want that kind of bad theater. They consider themselves smarter than that. It's going to happen in a gentle way, and everybody's concerned with acting the most civilized way as possible. Then they all have conflicting interests and it has to come out, and it comes out through a very civilized process, but it's brutal.
(Edith Scob and Juliette Binoche. Photo courtesy of Unifrance.)
Light Sensitive: The movie is quite different obviously from your previous three films, but one connecting thread with Juliette and Jérémie Renier’s characters both being expatriates is the kind of severe cultural dislocation and the sense of exile.
Assayas: It's the way globalization doesn't [alter] abstract parts of the economy. It has an effect on the fabric of each specific society. Twenty years ago, those characters would have different lives and careers. There would be less interconnection. Back then somebody who has a job in some French corporation very seldom had to go work abroad. Now, whatever business you're in, the chances for promotion are abroad. Corporations go international because that's the only way to survive and it's the way the world functions, and the work is in China, India or Russia.
If you're ambitious and you're talented, that's where they send you because that's where the future of any business is. In the past a French designer would work mostly in France. Now you're good at what you do, it's not an issue of language, one day you work at a hotel in Stockholm, the next day in San Paulo. It's exciting, part of history, it's great, and you have an expanded awareness of the world. But at the same time you're losing your roots because all of a sudden, whatever connects you to the specific place you're coming from is becoming more and more tenuous.
Light Sensitive: As a former writer for Cahiers du cinema, do you agree with Jean-Luc Godard's often-stated belief about the absence of separation between criticism and filmmaking.
Assayas: I kind of agree but I don't think I would put it that way. The continuity is there. When I started making my own short films and wrote for Cahiers, it wasn't because I wanted to become a film critic, it's because it was useful. I felt extremely privileged to writing about films and thinking about films because it could help me clear my own path with filmmaking. When I started making my own films, I didn't feel like I was a different person or I was making a major move.
In more general terms, the connection between cinema and film criticism is whatever is happening in the middle. Basically, the debate is not so much about how movies should be made but how modern reality should be represented. Ultimately if you practice cinema or film criticism, it ends up being a form of reflection on perception, on relationships to reality, how art deals simultaneously with reality and fantasy, and how the world keeps on changing. Because the world keeps on changing, you have to constantly keep on changing your own way of dealing with it.
I think film criticism is also at the core. Even simply, the critic begins to say, 'I've already seen it. I don't want to see that again.' The reason you don't want to see it again is not because you're bored with that specific theme, you're noticing the world is changing around us and whatever you're seeing for the thousandth time, it's not relevant anymore.
(Thanks to Aurelie Godet, Susan Norget and Ryan Werner)
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It was vital to go back to things that bring me back to my background, my history and ultimately an effort to make a kind of autobiographical movie.
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