Olivier Assayas (French:[ɔlivjeasajas]; born 25 January 1955) is a French film director, screenwriter and film critic. Assayas is known for his eclectic filmography, consisting of slow-burning period pieces, psychological thrillers, neo-noirs, and comedies. He has directed French, Spanish, and English-language films with international casts. The son of filmmaker Jacques Rémy, Assayas began his career as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma. There he wrote about world cinema and its film auteurs, who later influenced his work. Assayas made several short films, and made his feature debut with Disorder in 1986.
Assayas was born in Paris, France, the son of French director/screenwriter Raymond Assayas, alias Jacques Rémy (1911–1981). His father was of Turkish-Jewish origin and had settled in Italy, while his mother, Catherine de Károlyi, was a fashion designer of Protestant Hungarian origin.[1][2][3][4] Assayas started his career in the industry by helping his father. He ghostwrote episodes for TV shows his father was working on when his health failed. In a 2010 interview, Assayas said his main political influences when growing up were Guy Debord and George Orwell.[5] Of the 1968 May uprising to overthrow Charles de Gaulle, Assayas said: "I was defined by the politics of May '68, but for me May '68 was an anti-totalitarian uprising. People seemed to forget that at the occupied Odéon theater, you had crossed flags-black and red, and I was on the side of the black element."[6]
While working at Cahiers du cinéma, Assayas wrote lovingly about European film directors he admires but also about Asian directors. One of his films, HHH: A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien, is a documentary about Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien.
Assayas married Cheung in 1998. They divorced in 2001, but their relationship remained amicable, and in 2004 Assayas made his film Clean with her.
He met actress-director Mia Hansen-Løve when Hansen-Løve, 17 at the time, starred in Assayas's 1998 feature Late August, Early September, but they "didn't get together until [she] was 20".[7] They separated in 2017.
In 2009 and 2010, Assayas signed two petitions in support of director Roman Polanski, who had been detained while traveling to a film festival in relation to his 1977 sexual abuse charges, which the first petition argued would undermine the tradition of film festivals as a place for works to be shown "freely and safely", and that arresting filmmakers traveling to neutral countries could open the door "for actions of which no-one can know the effects".[8][9][10][11][12]
In an interview with Nick Pinkerton of Reverse Shot, Assayas talked about his influences:
That radicality in cinema involved just being outside of the world of modern images, and the key to it was the work of Robert Bresson, who has been by far the most important influence in my work, and intellectually it's been the influence of Guy Debord—basically, you know, it's been Debord-Bresson, Bresson-Debord, the things that've always defined my framework, the way I look at the world.[21]
Olivier Assayas, A Post-May Adolescence. Letter to Alice Debord, FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen Vol. 17, Vienna: SYNEMA - Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, 2012, ISBN978-3-901644-44-3
Kent Jones (Ed.), Olivier Assayas, FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen Vol. 16, Vienna: SYNEMA - Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, 2012, ISBN978-3-901644-43-6