Olivier AssayasEvery podcast appearance, updated as new ones drop

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2024 Berlinale kicked off on February 15. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection, including new films by Olivier Assayas, Mati Diop, Bruno Dumont, Hong Sangsoo, and many more. Subscribe to the Film Comment Letter to stay up-to-date. One of the early and most anticipated premieres of this year’s festival was Olivier Assayas’s new film Suspended Time. It’s a kind of companion piece to his 2008 movie Summer Hours, not to mention his recent TV series Irma Vep, although Suspended Time is the filmmaker’s most direct foray yet into autofiction. The film is based on the time that Assayas spent during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 confining with his brother Etienne—and their two partners—in their childhood home in the French countryside. The film stars Vincent Macaigne as a thinly veiled onscreen surrogate for Assayas (as in Irma Vep) and features dramatized scenes of the two brothers bonding, clashing, and reminiscing on the ways in which this house and home shaped them as artists and as men. Assayas also weaves interludes throughout the film, narrated by the director himself, in which he reflects on the objects and the landscapes of his youth, and how they’ve influenced his cinema. On today’s Podcast, FC Co-Editor Devika Girish interviewed Assayas about the making of the film, his thoughts on the genre of autofiction, and his relationship with his leading man, Vincent Macaigne, who he describes as an “agent of chaos.”

On this week’s Talkhouse Podcast we have the pleasure of reuniting two intensely creative individuals who first worked together decades ago: Emily Haines and Olivier Assayas. Haines is, of course, the singer and primary songwriter for the band Metric, which she’s been fronting for the past 20-plus years, and which sprang from the same fertile Canadian scene that gave the world Broken Social Scene and Stars, among many others—in fact, it’s Haines’ voice that you hear on Broken Social Scene’s biggest (and I would argue best) song, “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl.” But her primary focus over the years has of course been Metric, which just released their ninth album of thought-provoking indie-rock anthems, Formentera II . It’s a sequel to the excellent album they released exactly a year prior, and another collection of danceable, fantastic songs. Check out “Just the Once,” from Formentera II , which Haines describes as “regret disco.” So what does a catchy Canadian indie band have to do with a fearless French filmmaker like Olivier Assayas? A lot, as it turns out. Back when Assayas was prepping his 2004 film Clean , he needed a band to perform in a scene, and when he saw Metric, everything clicked: You can see the band perform their early hit “Dead Disco” in the movie, and Haines and Assayas hit it off after working together. Like Metric, Assayas has created an incredible body of work over the years, and done it—again like Metric—by following his own muse. His best-known films include Irma Vep , Clouds of Sils Maria , and 2016’s Personal Shopper , for which he was proclaimed Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival. In a strange twist, he was asked to re-created Irma Vep as a TV series for HBO, which he did under the condition that he have total artistic freedom. That came out last year, and it’s definitely worth checking out. These two get right into a great discussion about how they approach creating their art: Both rely on instinct rather than any desire for commercial success. They talk about the real Formentera—it’s an island in Spain—versus the one Haines created for these albums. They touch on Haines’ father, a well-known poet, and how that might have figured into her creative growth. Also, you’ll learn from this chat that every piano has one great song in it. Enjoy. Thanks for listening to the Talkhouse Podcast , and thanks to Emily Haines and Olivier Assayas for chatting. If you liked what you heard, please follow Talkhouse on your favorite podcasting platform, and check out all the great stuff at Talkhouse.com. This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan, and the Talkhouse theme is composed and performed by the Range. See you next time!

On the latest episode of the Talkhouse Podcast , two of the greatest living filmmakers, Kelly Reichardt and Olivier Assayas, sit down for an intimate conversation. Recorded last fall when Reichardt’s First Cow (in theaters March 6 through A24) and Assayas’ Wasp Network were both playing at the New York Film Festival, this talk sees the two comparing notes on the intricacies of their respective creative processes, from writing through to editing. They discuss the ways in which they differ (such as Assayas’ enforced spontaneity and Reichardt’s love of preparation), the personal backstories to Assayas’ films Cold Water and Summer Hours , Reichardt’s past growing up in a law-enforcement family in Miami, the way new technology figures in their work, and much more. For more filmmakers and comedians talking film and TV, visit Talkhouse Film at talkhouse.com/film . Subscribe now to stay in the loop on future episodes of the Talkhouse Podcast .

In our May-June issue (out now!), Aliza Ma writes about the new film Olivier Assayas’s Non-Fiction, a comedic portrait of a Paris literary set struggling to adapt to the digital age. Her essay begins, “In the cinema of Olivier Assayas, we find a laboratory of the world.” We had the good fortune to visit that laboratory in a new interview with the director. Film Comment contributor (and Curator of Film at the Museum of Moving Image) Eric Hynes sat down with Assayas for a conversation that expands on the ideas about technology and human relationships contained in Non-Fiction, and which bubble up throughout the director’s movies, such as Irma Vep, Personal Shopper, and Le destinées. Non-Fiction is in theaters now, including at Film at Lincoln Center.

Acclaimed director of 'Irma Vep' and 'Clouds of Sils Maria', Olivier Assayas, joins us to talk about his new film 'Personal Shopper'. Kristen Stewart stars as Maureen, a young American living in Paris, working as a shopper for a celebrity. The film follows Maureen through the mundanity of her working life, whilst she moonlights as a medium and tries to communicate with her recently deceased brother in the afterlife. On the podcast this week are Jake Cunningham, Daniella Verektenidi and Harry Chapman. Produced and edited by Jake Cunnningham Music supplied by incompetech.com Studio services by csrfm.com 
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