In a studio in France, partially blocking the view of a Louis Garrel film poster that leans against a brick wall, sits director Olivier Assayas. His new show has begun airing on HBO, yet he is still putting the finishing touches (sound, color correction, some editing, etc.) on the final episode of his eight-episode series, Irma Vep. His near giddy effervescence reveals both his enjoyment that the end is near and that he’ll be returning to filmmaking soon (his preference). Not that his remake of a remake of a remake wasn’t a rewarding experience. Television is just too much extra work for the celebrated director of Juliette Binoche in Summer Hours (2008), Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper (2016) and both in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014).

After helming over a dozen feature films, this is Assayas’ first as a writer, director, editor, producer, and showrunner for a high-profile streaming mini-series. To hear him tell it, the project was hatched out of boredom, during the lockdown that gripped the world. The fact that he chose to reexamine his own past by revisiting the 1996 film of the same name, that starred his former wife Maggie Cheung, suggests it was less like boredom and more of an outwardly imposed self-reflection.

There is no straightforward way to describe the layers that comprise the fabric of the HBO series. To say it’s a film about the making of a film only really gets it halfway. If the original Irma Vep was a film about Maggie Cheung attempting to make a remake of Les Vampires, a serialized silent film from 1915, then this current HBO series is an unraveling of Assayas’ own film in a thinly veiled comic reenactment of the making of Irma Vep (1996). You see, what was once a 10-episode, 7-hour silent film has passed through Assayas in 1996, only to find its way back to an 8-episode series that includes flashbacks to both the original Les Vampires (1915) and Irma Vep (1996) but is set in present day. Or, it's simply a show about making a movie--which isn't wrong, but it's also not true.

Starring Alicia Vikander, with a score by Thurston Moore, and a title sequence that looks like Wes Anderson hired Saul Bass for a Pink Panther film, HBO’s Irma Vep is like nothing else on television. It’s funny, weird, and a one-off. Which is all good news to creator and director Olivier Assayas who spoke to Flaunt in advance of the show’s forthcoming finale.

Irma Vep is a remake of your own film as a serialized television program, which itself was based on a serialized film. In your show, there is even some discussion among your characters about how much television has changed and if a “limited series” is just a long film.

It's a strange time to make movies—whatever movies are is in flux. When I got interested in the notion of doing a series based on Irma Vep, one of the major factors were the people producing it. I knew that I could trust A24. HBO have been great. I always had the sense they were the best people, who understood what I was doing and that I could have a level of freedom and independence to make this even if it took me to weird places. I don’t know of anyone else who would have given me that. So, there was something really exciting in the idea of dealing with a format that was completely new to me. It was a new language. Initially, I didn’t think I would end up writing and directing all eight episodes. I really thought this was something I was going to supervise. I would make a couple of the early episodes and do some kind of showrunner thing for the rest.

What changed?

When I started writing, it gradually became kind of personal, in ways that even my features haven’t been. I slowly saw the opportunity to go into completely new directions, to try new things. Again, I had a lot of time in front of me. I was one of the lucky ones. I spent most of lockdown in a country house. I would go jogging, I was playing tennis, and I was writing. So, I had time. What’s wrong with that? [Laughs] I started to write it and it came into place fairly naturally. It took me to places I had not imagined, including stuff I had to drop later, but that’s another story. Once I had written the first episode and the rest of it took shape, people were more excited about it than I expected. I thought they might freak out. But the more I explored the layers of the story, the more digressive routes I took, the more they [A24/HBO] seemed to like it. They encouraged me.

What was so strange about it that made you worried?

It’s a very complex show if you want to pitch it, but if you just watch, it’s quite simple because it’s my own story. It’s what I’ve had to deal with on set, but I deal with it as a comedy instead of making a big drama of it. I think comedy allows you to get away with a lot.

Some viewers haven’t found the humor and consider the characters to be insufferable, self-important people. Yet, Alicia Vikander is playing exactly the type of person you might think she is on set and that is the comedy. It’s real and a tricky type of performance.

It’s pretty real, yes. When a filmmaker makes a movie about cinema, he is making a movie about the world he lives in. You can’t cheat, you have to be 100 percent honest, even if you are making a comedy and using exaggeration. I love Ken Loach, for instance. But I think that Ken Loach has never made a movie that represents the way he actually lives. I mean, the guy has been making very successful movies for half-a-century and I don’t think he lives in the same way that his characters live. He’s a great portraitist of modern England and its evolution. I’m totally respectful of his work. But I wonder about how much he avoids grappling with his own reality. Once in a while, you have to face your own reality and damn the torpedoes.

Is this version of Irma Vep your most personal work?

I would say that. Movies, once they’re done, they are done. You can revisit them, as in the case with Irma Vep, because there was so much potential there to expand it. What really made me go back to it was when I realized that I had become part of my own cinema. When I made the original Irma Vep, it was complex, but it’s basic and pretty simple, ultimately. Now, for the series, my film of Irma Vep is part of the story.

To me, filmmaking and life are impossible to separate. They are one and the same thing. So, when I’m using my own film—or vampirizing my own movie in a certain way—I have the duty to be entirely sincere and also deal with the way that film has changed my life. Especially how my relationship with the actress (his former wife, Maggie Cheung) had been an important time for myself. Not in terms of filmmaking, in terms of real life! I’ve made some personal films, but I have never really made a movie about my relationship with Maggie. In the back of my mind, I’ve always had this idea that I’ve kind of needed to make one to be rid of that. But I don’t know if I would have made it if I had not been swallowed up by Irma Vep, you know? If I had made a movie about Maggie and myself, I would not have used the filmmaking element and the history of cinema narrative. It would have been more Bergman-esque. Here, there was the potential to deal with it, but deal with it very lightly and in a funny way. In a human way.

Some viewers seem to have missed the comic way in which you portray actors on set and simply feel as if they are watching something pretentious instead of pretentiousness portrayed realistically.

People’s reactions, it’s interesting, it’s fascinating, but also extremely weird. Because they haven’t seen the entire story yet. It has been going in pretty strange directions and there is still more to come. I locked the final image of the last episode as the show was already airing. I’m just sitting here with you speaking and just dying to tell you where it goes, but I can’t!

To me, I don’t perceive it as something that works episode by episode. It’s a sprawling narrative and it’s more like a novel and the more we move ahead, the deeper we go into the characters. The characters become more complex as the narrative becomes more and more complex. There is comedy—when I shoot comedy, I sometimes think that is what I should be doing because it’s what gives me the most pleasure in a certain way.

The mood and spirit on a film set is something you are obviously quite familiar with. When you had all that time to reflect, you decided to explore the comedy of that process instead of the drama.

Because I have the right actors! I have actors with the right sense of humor. Vincent Macaigne is brilliant, I think. Alicia is, you know, no one knows she has this great comedy streak. She is so good. She’s a genius, she knows how to do everything. You give her the tiniest thing and she will make something out of it. The smallest scene will become a moment.

There’s a line in an early episode, when Gottfried, the robe-wearing, crack-smoking German actor, says something about how Rainer Werner Fassbinder liked the American television show Dallas. I’m guessing that was a vague nod to Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore, another film about filmmaking which is also hilarious?

Oh, yes. Fassbinder is one of my favorite filmmakers and Beware of a Holy Whore was the inspiration for Irma Vep. Everybody told me, “Oh, you’re making Truffaut’s Day for Night.” Not at all. The one genuinely profound and powerful movie about modern filmmaking is Beware of a Holy Whore. I really wanted the character of Gottfried, as played by Lars Eldinger, to be the embodiment of whatever it is Fassbinder brought to cinema.

Has the experience of making this series encouraged you to pursue more—

No! [Laughs] No, no, no. The thing is, shooting a series is really hard work. It’s really tough. Writing it on your own, prepping it, shooting it, editing it, promoting it—you don’t have five minutes of freedom during the entire process. Until you lock the final image of the entire series, it’s scary. There’s something very heavy on your back. I’m not psychologically prepared to make another series [laughs]. I want to make a small-scale French film.

This last question might actually be annoying, so feel free to skip it. But you mentioned the world is changing and so is cinema. Plus, the film that Alicia Vikander’s character is promoting as she prepares to remake Les Vampires—the smaller film that she cares about more than her previous one—is a big-budget, superhero disaster movie called Doomsday. You’re clearly having fun at the expense of a certain type of movie, and this makes it impossible for me to avoid the so-called Scorsese question.

To me, the question is not if it is cinema. It is cinema. Cinema has been changing, it has been transforming. Is it cinema that I like? The answer is, ‘No way.’ I love movies. I watch mainstream Hollywood movies. Those movies, that are made with such demented budgets and with great actors—I just can’t sit through them. I get so bored. It’s the first time that mainstream American cinema has felt so boring to me. It should be exciting. It should have a lot of energy. They are spending so much money on special effects. But, ultimately, it’s very, very, very boring to me. And it’s kind of disturbing because I have been a reader of Marvel comics. I love Marvel comics. I used to really enjoy them. They took the life out of them. They were funnier, more complex, they were sexy, they had something lively, slightly transgressive, a bit crazy—but these movies are just so desperately normal. The question is not ‘What is cinema?’ Ultimately, I don’t care because it’s a matter of words. But to me, cinema is freedom. If you don’t have freedom, it’s not cinema.