Top 6 Quotes & Sayings by Olivier Assayas

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French film director Olivier Assayas.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
Olivier Assayas

Olivier Assayas is a French film director, screenwriter and film critic. Assayas is known for his slow-burning period pieces, psychological thrillers, neo-noirs and French comedies. His work has become synonymous with the film movement known as the New French Extremity and has collaborated frequently with Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart. The son of filmmaker Jacques Rémy, Assayas began his career as a critic for influential magazine Cahiers du Cinema. Here he wrote about the World Cinema and its film auteurs who would later influence his own works. Assayas made several shorts, and then made the leap from writer to screenwriter.

I think that the mourning process of the film involves discussing it, dissecting it, and at some point, you get bored with it. I'm not there yet, but I know I will be there at some point. That's the moment when I know I need to turn the page and move on and recharge my batteries.
The idea to have both something that belongs to what we call supernatural and, at the same time, is anchored in the real world, I think it gives more strength to whatever has to do with the real world and whatever has to do with some transcendence of the material world.
I think movies are expressions of our imagination; they are expressions of our conscious and of our subconscious. I think that movies can be analyzed the way dreams are analyzed, and sometimes I feel that the viewers or the journalists I discuss the film with are psychoanalysts who are trying to make sense of my dreams.
Movies are explorations; they take you on a path, and I think it's always better if it's a path that you don't know, that takes twists and turns that you can't predict. That's what's entertaining about movies. That's what's entertaining about novels.
When I make films I'm very intuitive; I'm instinctive. When you are shooting there's little time to think about abstract ideas, it's about getting things done, getting them right, and trying to channel the energies and get the best of whatever you have on your set. It's only once the film is finished that it's like, "Okay, let's try to figure out what happened." Try to figure out exactly what I did.
I hate to write and spend months just waiting for the film to get financed. Then when you start preparing the film and you shoot it, you've already forgotten why you wanted to make the film in the first place. I like to have some kind of coherent energy that takes you through writing, preparing, shooting.
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