Olivier Assayas:
Member, Award winning film director from France
Olivier Assayas (born January 25, 1955) emerged as a filmmaker in France in the second half of the 1980s, after writing for
Cahiers du Cinéma between 1979 and 1985. This activity as a critic elicits an obvious parallel with the young turks in the 1950s, who all wrote film criticism for
Cahiers as a training ground, with an eye to directing later. So did Assayas, who used these years to articulate personal ethical and aesthetic choices, also experimenting with his short films in the meantime.
While he was too young to witness the advent and development of the
nouvelle vague as it took place, and never considered himself a cinephile, Assayas undoubtedly put into practice a conception of cinema and of filmmaking that situated him in the lineage of François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda.
Economically, each of his films is tailored to allow him a large measure of creative control and make close collective. Likewise, his casts have often featured recurring actors, in parts very different in substance and scope: Charles Berling, Virginie Ledoyen, Nathalie Richard, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Jeanne Balibar, and of course Maggie Cheung, not to mention the brief but always strong apparitions of countless familiar figures (Elli Medeiros, Alex Descas, Arsinée Khanjian, Smaïl Mekki), which from one film to the next suggests an open troupe.
Filmography:
