"For me, filmmaking is a process of discovering what the film is rather than simply executing it." - An Interview With Olivier Assayas

Olivier Assayas's career to date has been defined by its variety and range, with each film taking the French director into an exciting new direction. However, his last two features have been preoccupied with the political climate and revolutionary spirit of the 1970s, with his epic Carlos being followed by the autobiographical drama Something in the Air. In his latest film, Assayas follows a young man as he engages in student radicalism before being drawn to the world of filmmaking, following a trajectory that closely mirrors his own. It's another astutely observed, fluidly directed and richly atmospheric film from one of the most consistently impressive filmmakers working today, and I met Olivier Assayas this week to discuss it.

How does it feel to get back to making a regular-sized film after Carlos?

Well, I knew I would have to downsize! [Laughs] I initially wanted to go as far as I could in terms of downsizing, and that's why I wrote a story about teenagers, which was as simple as it gets, but gradually I realised it was much more complex than I ever imagined. The film grew much bigger in certain ways than I initially anticipated because of the reconstruction of that era, the '70s. Ultimately it was much more difficult, in terms of recreating the era, than Carlos, because we shot Carlos in certain parts of Germany or Lebanon where it's easier to recreate the 1970s. Recreating the '70s in Paris or around Paris is very difficult, every street shot is a problem and it's a nightmare to find locations. I also realised that the film only worked if I was absurdly careful with the details of it, and that ended up obliging me to focus on areas of filmmaking that I usually don't have to deal with. I had to be there for the sets, the props, the costumes and everything in ways that are way beyond what you usually do on the film set. I was working with the same crew and they are really excellent, but here it was very much a matter of every detail being exactly correct or otherwise it would throw the whole thing of balance. So in the end the film was much tougher to make than I had imagined.

Does the autobiographical element also make a difference? Is it harder because it's more personal?

Yes and no. I suppose the fact that I deal with places, people and situations that I have first-hand experience of is more challenging because I can't get away with just recreating the '70s, I have to recreate the mood of the '70s. I have feel the things I felt when I was experiencing those events and situations. It imposes on you to be much more rigorous than when I was doing Carlos, for instance, because Carlos is part a recreation of a reality and part fantasy.

I felt the presentation of the '70s was very immediate. I didn't feel that it was an older man looking back on his youth with a sense of judgement or hindsight.

Yes, that was essential. In a certain way it was the difference between Carlos and this film. Carlos is seen from the point of view of today on events forty years ago, based on knowledge we have now and did not have at the time. When I started thinking about Something in the Air it was the idea of making a film immersed and embedded in the 1970s, in the middle of the chaos of it. If you want to revive the idealism, the hope or the dreams of those years you have to do it from the perspective of being inside it, not to try and second-guess it or whatever.

I guess with a movie like this we often try to draw parallels with modern times, but there's a genuine sense of hope in these youngsters rather than the disillusionment and cynicism we might see today.

Yes, but the thing is that you are depending on history and your times. The '70s generation didn't just pop up, it was something that was carried by social history. In the '60s you have this youth movement and it's something worldwide. All of a sudden you have the youth questioning the values of modern society, and it's not like kids criticising their parents, it's a whole generation that believes it has some kind of historical mission to accomplish a revolution. We're talking about the generation before mine who did May '68, more like the baby boomer generation. The generation that comes after that has a sense of living in some revolutionary times because we had the model of May '68. There was this event and nobody has really made sense of it, but at least it had this explosive energy that echoed within the whole of French society. You had this powerful youth movement all over the world simultaneously and there really was a sense that it was going to throw the whole of western society off balance. We were part of a generation that would finally change the values of western society, but we were empowered by something that went way, way back to the late 19^th century. There was this belief in the past, this knowledge and scholarship about the revolutionary past. In high school you would discuss the fine print of the Russian revolution or the Spanish civil war or the Chinese civil war, and you were extremely precise. You knew exactly where the anarchists stood in relation to the Trotskyists, you knew where this group of Trotskyists stood in relation to this group of Maoists, and you knew all the nuances. And we had a faith in the future.

Today you don't have any kind of defining event like May '68 to propel the youth. On the opposite, you have this kind of discouragement about politics and this disastrous feeling about politicians on the major issues in today's world. You don't have something that would be a positive point of reference for any profound criticisms of today's society, so everyone sees what's wrong but there is a fear that if you contradict it you will end up in a horrible place, like Soviet Russia or something like that.

We see in the film that these would-be revolutionaries were divided among themselves into bickering factions. There was no way of harnessing this spirit into a single unify force for change.

Yeah, that is exactly what happened. Ultimately that is the history of French leftism, and it's possibly the root of its failure.

I wanted to ask how your writing informs your direction, because when I watch your films they feel very loose and spontaneous, not as if you have rigidly planned each sequence.

I write very minimal screenplays, with very little description. I write it the way you would write a play or something like that. I describe very briefly the mood or the background and then I would go very quickly to the action or the dialogue. I really have this conviction that you have to leave it as open as you can so you can adapt to the locations, to the actors, to the ideas you will have on the set. The thing is that when you read the screenplay after watching the film, you will realise it is very precise and it is all there, but when you read the screenplay without having any notion of the images you will have a hard time imagining them. To me, a screenplay has to remain open but what is important is the backbone, it needs to have some narrative logic that structures the film and gives it a base, its musicality if you prefer. Within those scenes you can give yourself space to expand, retract, reinvent and transform while knowing that you can always rely on the backbone. For instance, not only do I never storyboard but I don't even design a shot until the very morning of the shoot, because whatever I will do with a specific scene is defined by what I have done in the previous scenes of the film. So it can't be something pre-planned that I will execute; the style of the film is something that will take shape day after day. For me, filmmaking is a process of discovering what the film is rather than simply executing it.

You have a number of young actors in this film with no experience. Do you have to direct performers like that in a different way to your professional cast?

The only one who has any kind of solid experience is Lola Créton, because she was the lead in a couple of films, and India Menuez has done some small things but she's not really an actress, she's actually a visual artist. The thing is that it's a completely different approach to what I have been doing in my recent films, which is mixing actors and non-actors. When you have smart actors who understand what you are looking for and know what you are trying to do, you can give them space and they will use it; well, some of them will use it and some of them won't, it depends on their instincts. When you have individuals who have no experience in acting and you throw them into a scene with actors, they can also improvise because they just react, but with kids – and specifically when you are representing the 1970s – you can't give them much space to improvise because they would not use the right language or have the correct reaction. So it does become a very different style of directing actors to whatever I have been doing recently.

Finally, one film that has been referenced a lot in relation to this film is Cold Water, but that seems to be the hardest of all your films to see, in this country at least.

That film has a disastrous story, it's just ridiculous. I should sum it up because it's funny, actually. The film should have been in competition in Cannes and this got to the ears of some guy at Polygram, which was a quote-unquote "European major." We shot the film for no money and made it in four weeks, and our producer had no belief in the film, it was just like nothing, some tiny thing he had helped produce. When the Polygram guy came to him he said, "Oh great, I'll give you the international rights to the film, we'll share the profits," and then we signed the contract and it's done. It was done in five minutes and he gave away the rights to the film for fifteen years, to this guy from Polygram. Then – it was similar to Carlos, actually – all of a sudden there was a legal problem with having Cold Water in competition at Cannes because it was made with TV money, so we were out competition and in Un Certain Regard, which was fine, I was more than happy to be there. And then this guy from Polygram who was running some kind of "classics" division was fired, and they closed down Polygram Classics after six months, so we ended up in their catalogue in London where nobody knew what the film was. The thing is that they had tried to sell it in Cannes for an absurd amount of money – which I think had something to do with why the guy was fired [laughs] – so he never sold a single territory and the film remained in Polygram's library. Then Polygram fell apart, it was bought by Universal, so now the rights belong to Universal in LA and every single time I have tried to get the rights back they have told me that Universal has a policy of never selling their assets.

Not even to the director?

Not to anyone. After fifteen years they lost the rights, but at that point we didn't have the music rights anymore, because we had bought the music rights for ten years or twelve years and now we have to re-pay for the music rights. Criterion wanted to release it but as soon as they saw the bill they said, "Whoa, this is crazy." I don't know, it will take time. At least I managed to have new prints made, and the film was released on DVD in France so at least there is a DVD, even though it doesn't have English subtitles, which is a pity. But there is an English-subtitled print and I think at some point I will end up buying back the rights. It's just one of those absurd stories.

Review - It's Such a Beautiful Day

Bill is a pencil-drawn stick man. He has a circle for a head and his eyes are merely two small black dots. He doesn't speak, and his only distinguishing feature is the hat that is permanently perched on his head. Bill is the star on Don Hertzfeldt's first feature film It's Such a Beautiful Day, and although we spend little over an hour in his company, the brilliance of Hertzfeldt's craft ensures that Bill is one of the most fully realised characters you'll see in a movie all year. You won't believe how much emotion Hertzfeldt can elicit from that simple little black-and-white creation.

Of course, we've already seen Don Hertzfeldt work wonders with stick men in his acclaimed short films. In Rejected, he created an increasingly anarchic series of comic commercials before the whole film deteriorated and collapsed in on itself, while The Meaning of Life incorporated dazzling in-camera effects to take us on a journey through time and space. The short films he has made show an artist gradually growing in confidence and technique, and testing the boundaries of what his chosen medium can do, but nothing can prepare you for the advances he has made in his latest work. It's Such a Beautiful Day consists of three short films (Everything will be OK, I Am So Proud of You and It's Such a Beautiful Day) that Hertzfeldt has edited into single work, and the complexity and depth of the film, both in its storytelling and emotional content, is simply staggering.

As Hertzfeldt's visual and thematic ambitions have moved forward, the one constant in his work has been the simplicity of his protagonists. Bill remains a simple stick man, whose lack of defining characteristics only serve to make him more relatable to the viewer. When placed against the live-action footage and optical effects that Hertzfeldt layers into the film, the subtle manipulations of Bill's few features imbue him with an extraordinary depth and humanity. When he leans forward to look at the words "I love you" written in the sand, the manner in which he moves and peers intently expresses a whole range of feelings – curiosity, sadness, confusion, hope – and Hertzfeldt creates such moments throughout the film, often simply through a minute variance in the positioning of his eyes or hands. When Bill receives an unwelcome diagnosis from his doctor, he removes his hat from his head and disconsolately rubs his head with his hand. It's one of the most surprising moments in the film, and it carries an incredible power.

It's Such a Beautiful Day begins by taking us through the mundane episodes of Bill's nondescript life, all of which is narrated by Hertzfeldt in a dispassionate, deadpan style. Some of these brief vignettes are funny and surreal, such as Bill's reasons for pulling fruit from the back of the supermarket shelves, or his vision of humans as little more than brains and spinal cords wandering around independently, but gradually the tone darkens. It's Such a Beautiful Day is a film about Bill's failing mind and body, territory that Hertzfeldt charts fearlessly but with a tangible tenderness. The film's non-chronological structure shuttles back and forth between Bill's present-day experiences and his often-troubling memories of growing up in a family embattled by mental illness. A Proustian instinctiveness drives Hertzfeldt's exploration of Bill's world, with memories being sparked by objects or emotions and then connections being drawn with other experiences, but he never allows the audience to feel lost as we pinball around inside this emotionally wrenching tale, even as the complexity of his visual and aural design threatens to overwhelm.

It's hard to think of another recent film that has explores themes of life and death with such a light but perceptive touch. The construction of It's Such a Beautiful Day (along with some shared musical choices) recalls Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, but in truth there is nothing to compare it with because Hertzfeldt is a truly original voice. It's Such a Beautiful Day a miniature epic; a film replete with sublime, heart-stopping moments that manages to detail the whole of a man's life, laying bare his heart and soul, in just 61 minutes. Don Hertzfeldt has always been a singular talent, but this film shows us a maturation and refinement of his artistry, and his deepening humanism. His earlier short films were often cruel and nihilistic, but It's Such a Beautiful Day has a lingering hopefulness, even in death. Bill may only be a few pencil markings on a piece of paper, but Hertzfeldt has created a character who will live forever.

It's Such a Beautiful Day is available to watch here.

Review - Sleepwalk With Me

At the start of Sleepwalk With Me, Mike Birbiglia turns to the camera and insists that the story we are about to see is true. He also reminds the audience to turn off their mobile phones, before he recalls being in a cinema when a fellow audience member answered his phone with "Who dis?" – "Not only was he willing to talk to someone on the phone, he was willing to talk to anyone on the phone!" a perplexed Birbiglia exclaims. This opening quickly establishes the style that will carry Birbiglia through his debut feature; the stand-up comic's wry observations on everyday absurdities, the frequent reiteration that all of this really happened, and the direct address to the viewer, which allows him to take us into his confidence and ask for our support. "It's important before I tell you this portion of the story to remind you that you're on my side," he tells us before an episode that potrays him in a particularly unflattering light.

Birbiglia's ability to keep us onside even as his behaviour occasionally appalls us is one of the key factors in Sleepwalk With Me's success. He has given the leading character in the film the name Matt Pandamiglio, but the events his film depicts are drawn from those covered in Birbiglia's confessional one-man show. Matt is an aspiring stand-up comedian whose aspirations haven't been dimmed by the lack of success he has had with his few performances to date. His girlfriend Abby (Lauren Ambrose) is supportive of his ambitions, but she wants something more from their long and now stagnating relationship. Abby has started talk of marriage and kids, something which sends Matt into paroxysms of anxiety, and that anxiety manifests itself as a series of incredibly vivid dreams and sleepwalking episodes.

One of the more persistent and troubling archetypes in recent American comedy is the selfish, commitment-phobic schlub who nonetheless manages to sustain a relationship with a woman who clearly deserves much better. When the star of the film is the director or creative force of the picture, this disparity between partners can come off looking like narcissism or wish-fulfilment, and some viewers will surely note that Matt doesn't deserve a woman as virtuous and lovely as Abby, even before his behaviour seals the deal. Much of the film is based around his unkindness and deception. When he finally gets the opportunity to take his act on the road, driving hundreds of miles for low-rent gigs, his first spark of success comes after he introduces his marriage woes into his routine with the line, "I don't want to get married until I'm sure nothing else good can happen in my life." Matt makes his relationship with Abby the central thread of his act, hiding this fact from her while she waits at home, proud of his promising progress reports from the road.

Birbiglia gets away with it partly through his own affable charm, and partly because his film feels so well-observed and sincere. Both the portrait of a young comedian's struggles and the scenes of awkward domesticity feel authentically depicted, and the fantasy interludes drawn from Birbiglia's nightmares ensure the film feels more accomplished cinematically than a stand-up's adaptation of his own routine might otherwise have been. In many respects, the tone and content of the film recalls Annie Hall, though there's a rough-and-ready quality to Birbiglia's filmmaking that leaves it falling short of Allen's great relationship comedy. There is plenty of promise evident in Sleepwalk With Me, though, and Birbiglia has already stated his intention to adapt his latest autobiographical comedy routine for the screen too. In Sleepwalk With Me he manages to play himself as the bad guy and still earn our sympathy; whether he'll be able to pull off the same trick twice is an open question.

Review - The Look of Love

Steve Coogan stares directly at the camera with one eyebrow raised and says, "My name is Paul Raymond. Welcome to my world of erotica." When The Look of Love opens in this way, it's hard not to recall Coogan's first collaboration with director Michael Winterbottom, 24 Hour Party People. In that film, Coogan played Tony Wilson and frequently broke the fourth wall to offer his commentary on events as we watched them unfold. But The Look of Love is not a film in a similar vein to that portrait of the Manchester music scene, and this early moment of self-awareness is not representative of the film's subsequent tone. In fact, it is more suggestive of a picture that doesn't seem sure what exactly it wants to be, or what story it wants to tell, from one scene to the next.

This lack of a coherent focus continues with the film's opening scenes, which are set in the early 1960s and are shot in black-and-white, although Winterbottom makes no attempt to impose similar distinctive aesthetics on any of the subsequent decades that his film covers. At this time, Paul Raymond was a touring coastal towns with his saucy variety act, and thirty years later his sex and property empire made him the richest man in Britain. This is undoubtedly a remarkable rise and compelling films have been built out of less interesting figures, but Winterbottom and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh aren't disciplined enough to focus on the key areas of the tale and to dig beneath the flashy surface.

The strongest thread is the relationship between Raymond and his daughter Debbie, played with an affecting fragility by Imogen Poots. Debbie was the child with whom Raymond had the deepest bond (his son left for America with his wife after the breakup of their marriage) and he had planned to hand the running of his various businesses on to her before she died from a drug overdose in 1992. Winterbottom occasionally cuts from the narrative to scenes of an ageing Raymond sitting alone, watching footage of his lost daughter, lost in his memories and his grief. It's a big stretch for Coogan to bring the necessary gravitas to this role (the ghosts of Tony Wilson, Alan Partridge and Tony Ferrino are never fully dispelled), but the moments in which he genuinely seems to connect with Poots are where the film briefly takes on another dimension. When Raymond has to face the fact that his daughter is not talented enough to lead the show he wrote for her, the scenes between them carry a real emotional weight. The fact that the film's title comes from a song that Debbie sings indicates that this is the heart of the story, but it's something that Winterbottom only flits in and out of, as he gets derailed by other, less rewarding, details.

The Look of Love is a maddeningly uneven picture. When it isn't squeezing in distracting comic cameos (Stephen Fry, Dara O'Briain, Matt Lucas and David Walliams) or unilluminating montages, it's indulging rote scenes of hedonistic excess that feel like little more than a watered-down Boogie Nights. Potentially intriguing aspects of Raymond's tale are left frustratingly unexplored, such as his discovery of a son from a previous relationship, which is raised and then forgotten about in a single scene. The film hops along in its energetic but episodic fashion, as if we should congratulate the filmmakers for touching upon so many aspects of the Paul Raymond story instead of questioning whether they have sufficiently explored any of it.

Michael Winterbottom is a director whose refusal to be pinned down and categorised has resulted in a body of work that is wonderfully eclectic in its style and content. But he can't quite find the right approach here, and the result is a fleetingly enjoyable but ultimately shallow and unfocused biopic. Winterbottom directed one of the all-time great London-based films with his 1999 drama Wonderland, and there was certainly potential for another landmark capital picture in this study of "The King of Soho," but the only real point of interest for Londoners lies in spotting the familiar locations that act as backdrop to the disappointingly mundane story. 

Review - Army of Shadows

Army of Shadows was the third film Jean-Pierre Melville made about life in France under Nazi occupation, but it feels more of a piece with his later gangster films than it does with Le Silence de la mer or Léon Morin, Priest. The film was made in the middle of a series of crime films – preceded by Le Deuxième Souffle and Le Samouraï, and followed by Le Cercle rouge and Un flic – and the characters in Army of Shadows could have walked into any of those pictures. They are men who stalk the streets in a watchful and furtive manner, and whose alliances are built on practical needs and a shaky sense of trust. They are men united by an ever-present fatalism, knowing that this game they play will likely end in death. They are men who live in the shadows.

It's safe to say that Army of Shadows would have been a very different film if Melville had made it just after he first read Joseph Kessel's novel in 1943 rather than 25 years later. The director needed to hone his style before attempting this most personal of films, and in many ways he used the filming of Le Deuxième Souffle in 1966 as a dry run for scenes in this picture. Ultimately, the cool, detached directorial approach that Melville had developed by the late '60s was perfectly suited to a world in which careless talk cost lives. Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) is certainly a man who remains tight-lipped unless speaking is absolutely necessary. He prefers to observe a situation before making a decisive act, and in this respect he is the perfect Melville hero.

Gerbier is the leader of a small group of underground fighters trying to blow holes in the Nazi war machine and evade capture. The film opens with Gerbier being transported to a concentration camp, but Melville quickly establishes his protagonist's cunning nature, as he evaluates his campmates and keeps his eyes open for an opening that might lead to escape. The manner in which Melville shoots Gerbier's daring flight for freedom is indicative of the measured approach he takes throughout the film. The act of escape itself takes place in just a few moments and a handful of shots, but the build-up, in which Gerbier surveys the situation and settles on the best way to play his hand, and the aftermath are where the real action lies. As he runs from the Nazi headquarters, Gerbier ducks into a barbershop for sanctuary, and he has to spend an uncomfortable period wondering if the man holding a razor to his throat is a friend or a foe.

In this world, the risk of betrayal is ever-present, and Melville utilises that as a constant source of tension. When a traitor is discovered in their midst, Gerbier and his cohorts must deal with him in the way that traitors had to be dealt with, and Melville makes this scene into the film's agonising centrepiece. It is a masterpiece of staging and editing, as the men must first deal with the unexpected complication of a family living next to their safe house, meaning that a quick death by gunshot is off the cards. As his captors search for an alternative means of disposal, the young turncoat stands rigidly against a back wall, consumed with fear, awaiting his fate.

Melville's characters are defined by their actions rather than their psychological makeup. He presents them to us with little fanfare and gives the actors room to inhabit their roles, and to come to life for us as we watch them go perform their functions in the Resistance effort. The great Simone Signoret plays Mathilde, one of the many women who played a key part in the Resistance thanks to their ability to evade suspicion at checkpoints (we see Jean-Pierre Cassel avoiding a Nazi search a train station by picking up a woman with young children on the platform). The central characters in Army of Shadows are stoic, determined and honourable, and on more than one occasion they refuse to yield information under torture, but Melville doesn't overplay their heroism. Pierre Lhomme's cinematography is stark and dispassionate, with scenes seemingly drained of all colour except for a pallid grey that reinforces the sense of foreboding and futility that hangs over much of the action.

Army of Shadows was released in 1969 and instantly fell victim to disastrously poor timing. In post-1968 France the film was seen as a hopeless Gaullist throwback, with the now unpopular President being depicted in the film's strange (and, in truth, unnecessary) London-set interlude. It flopped at the box office and failed to find international distribution for many years. In fact, the film wasn't seen on American shores until 2006, when it was hailed as a masterpiece and collected the Best Foreign Language Film prize from the New York Critics' Circle. This validation came too late for Melville, who completed two more films before dying at the young age of 55 in 1973. He never saw his most personal film receiving the adulation it deserved, but one hopes he died knowing that he had made a great film, and one that honoured the courage of the men and women who fought for French freedom.

Army of Shadows is available on blu-ray now