‘Irma Vep’ Director Olivier Assayas and Star Vincent Macaigne Finally Answer Whether Or Not Making A TV Series Is Really Like “Making An 8 Hour Movie”

The French filmmaking great Olivier Assayas took a bite out of show business in 1996 with Irma Vep, a meta-masterpiece that uses a production remaking a silent thriller serial as a vessel for a state-of-the-industry address. A quarter-century later, he’s revisiting the concept in the form of an HBO miniseries, the first sign of how much has changed in the intervening years. Accordingly, the director of the project-within-the-project (Vincent Macaigne) is now slumming it in TV as well, convincing himself that he hasn’t turned his back on cinema. The updated iteration of the starring actress (played by a never-better Alicia Vikander) comes to set hot off a sci-fi franchise, fielding calls about an offer to portray a gender-flipped Silver Surfer for the Disney-Marvel behemoth. The percolating behind-the-scenes romances now play out under the hawklike gaze of Twitter and Instagram. Assayas excels in pinpointing the here and now without coming off like a trend-chaser, articulating the present with surgical specificity while situating it in a vaster canvas of history.

The first three episodes premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, practically a second home to Competition regular Assayas, who nabbed a Best Director prize in 2016 for Personal Shopper. (You know, the one where a ghost cyberbullies Kristen Stewart for a solid half hour, the one met with a healthy mix of boos and standing ovations from the Croisette crowds.) He and Macaigne sat down with Decider at a beachfront restaurant almost too perfectly exemplifying the sun-drenched glamour associated with the festival for a chat expanding on the show’s diagnosis of its field: algorithms, streaming, globalization, and more. 

DECIDER: It’s been 26 years since your last take on Irma Vep, which also surveyed the film industry specific to its time. What’s changed in filmmaking that you wanted to check back in on?

OLIVIER ASSAYAS: I think it’d be a shorter answer if I listed what hasn’t changed. I think everything is different! The digital migration of cinema, TV has been totally revolutionized, we’re all on the internet now, using social media. The thing is that cinema changes along with the world, though sometimes it trails a little behind. It’s alive, in that the range of what filmmaking is has expanded.

Expanded? It feels like more and more of the total market share is being eaten up by franchises, superheroes, all that.

OA: Oh, yeah. And no judgement on the actual nature of the content, but special effects have invaded the cinema, and that’s changed Hollywood in profound, complex ways. It’s not so much how everything has changed since I was making the other Irma Vep, it’s more that the process of transformation for the cinema is never finished. What we are trying to capture with this, the full version, is the nature of that change happening now. It’s always present tense, down to the moment.

It’s funny, this is situated in the French film industry, but it seems like a lot of these concerns are shared in the States.

OA: Definitely, and the important element is the difference between a French indie no-budget production has now become an HBO series, so it’s an international hybrid. A French director, working with an American network, and a cast from all over the world. 

You’ve both directed films, and judging from Irma Vep, the main work of a director is portrayed as putting out the fires that dozens of people bring to you every day. Do you find this to be true, that it’s non-stop problem-solving?

VINCENT MACAIGNE: For me, when I work as an actor, especially with Olivier, I’m only taking part of him for the character. He’s inspiring that way. The dialogue made me feel free to try different things within this text.

OA: The character’s both a double and a parody of me. Vincent has known me long enough to get how to do both at once. An excellent impersonator. I leave a lot of space to my actors, and from the moment we agree on how a role will be played, the actor knows more than I do about the part. I’m open to ideas and suggestions, which is why I like working with someone like Vincent, who understands directing and the issues that are part of it. He’s almost co-directing.

VM: No, I am not!

When the character Edmond does that kind of thing in the series, it drives his director crazy.

OA: This is me making fun of myself! 

VM: If you listen to Olivier, he gives a lot of direction, but he does this sweetly. Most of the time, I look at him, and his smile makes you happy. Though there is also a smile where you can tell that he’s not so happy. Either way, you know that he’ll be tender with you. Just looking at him, you can tell if a take was good or not, but you’re not scared to go again. 

OA: Vincent’s actually putting it the best possible way, because I don’t trust words when directing. If I try to put what I expect into words, I spoil the spontaneity of the actor’s invention. I first just want to see what happens, and only then do I get a picture of what I’m looking for. As much as I can, I avoid words, because they reduce a scene. They close in, instead of opening up.

VM: Do you know [René-Charles] Guilbert [de Pixérécourt], Olivier?

OA: Of course I know him.

VM: I read a book of his, and you’re not so far from him. He was an amazing stage director, gone now. Olivier is always trying to find grace near to the ghost of something in the past. 

One of the distinctly modern things included in the new Irma Vep is the rise of algorithms in streaming. I was surprised, after seeing a lot of talk about this in your Non-Fiction, to see your next film Wasp Network go to Netflix.

OA: Honestly, I was so grateful to Netflix, for the sake of the producers and financiers. You know? It was a complicated movie to make, specifically because we shot in Cuba, which was tough.

Was that a factor in the difficulty of getting distribution?

OA: No, no. We finished in time for Venice in 2019, and it got a French release, and Netflix bought it for the US and a few other territories. It was supposed to have a bigger theatrical release, but then COVID came. It’s a big movie, and if I made one movie that needs the big screen, it’s that one. But this wasn’t frustrating to me, because thanks to Netflix, it was seen around the world at a time when most movies weren’t. And it did well in French theaters, because it opened in a lucky period of time between a wave of strikes with the Yellow Vests, and then COVID on the other side. In France, the usual crowds got the chance to see it before French cinema was done for over the rest of the year.

Vincent’s character says he thinks of directing a miniseries like making an eight-hour movie rather than TV, a thing lots of showrunners are known to say as of late. Do you share that mindset?

OA: Not really! 

VM: For me, it’s the same job. But it’s like doing eight small movies in six months. 

OA: The difference is I’m writing longer scenes. It’s something that Vincent and I developed together when we were doing Non-Fiction. I used some of the things I learned on that production, that you can do long scenes of dialogue and shoot very fast. I knew during the writing process that some scenes needed big visuals, very spectacular, but then if I wanted to keep that on the right level, you also need the breaks for dialogue that you can take your time with. Writing those gives you more space to develop your characters, explore their interiors. The two different movements, seen from the inside out, are at work in cooperation. That’s exciting to me.

VM: Olivier actually wrote a little movie we wanted to shoot before the series, and that script helped me to appreciate the way my character thinks, and how Olivier thinks.

Do you think you’ll make that movie, now that this is all wrapped up?

OA: Probably not. I wanted to, but I had no idea how quickly Irma Vep would come together. I’d barely finished the pilot and the show bible, and HBO immediately wanted more, by the sixth of June last year. I held on to the delusion that I could sneak in a small movie before doing the series, but that took over my life very soon. And anyway, it was a COVID lockdown movie that I wrote in a week, very contained, small-scale and autobiographical. And there have been too many of those, so things that seemed new and exciting are already old and commonplace. Maybe I’ll adapt parts of it and shoot next year, I don’t know.

I noticed in the credits that the American playwright Jeremy O. Harris worked as a ‘supervising producer.’ What sort of contributions did he bring to the process?

OA: HBO brought in Jeremy. I love his work, and I like him, he’s here with us. But to be totally honest, there was no time. He did rewrites on the dialogue, but we couldn’t really use it, just because he finished too late, by the point that we were already in production. We used some lines he suggested, definitely in the first episode and possibly in the second, but after that, the timing just wasn’t right. 

One of the my favorite new additions is the character Gottfried, who seems like he’ll just say or do anything people will find provocative. Is it liberating, to write a character like that?

OA: Yes! I like the idea of being the naughty boy who’ll say any horrible thing that comes to mind. I love uninhibited people. This is the third time I’ve worked with [actor] Lars [Eidinger], and I’d never seen his work with the German stage director Thomas Ostermeier. For me, he’d played quiet, precise, intense characters, and then I went to go see him in Richard III, and he was demented! Absolutely crazy, in the best possible sense, a spectacular performance. I never realized he could do that, a whole side of him I never used, and I wanted to bring all that out. We had a lot of fun, going over the top, and then Lars brought it even farther.

The fake crack he smokes, what’s that made out of?

OA: I’m not totally sure. The prop master brings me a crack rock as his first job, saying, “I’ve devised this great thing you can actually use, it looks like you’re inhaling but you’re not, it’s going to look very realistic.” I’ve never used crack in my life, and have no plan to. So I took his word for it!

Irma Vep, which just debuted at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, will begin airing on HBO Max on Monday, June 6.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.