French art-house director Olivier Assayas tells us why cinema is just like texting,
Olivier Assayas on his new ghost story/ romance/ art-house thriller, Personal Shopper
On my way to talk to Olivier Assayas, I received a text message from an unknown number. I’d damaged my iPhone irreparably the day before, and with no time to enter names and numbers, I was flying blind with the replacement.
Every message is a mystery when you’re using a phone without contacts. And it’s a mystery Assayas understands well: the acclaimed French director’s latest picture, Personal Shopper, is all about the suspense of not knowing who’s on the other end of an iMessage chat. The film’s hero, Maureen ( Kristen Stewart), finds herself embroiled with an enigmatic stranger through text messages. It’s a ghost story in which the iPhone’s messagesending ellipses seem to channel the dead.
I spoke with Assayas about how cinema is like texting and whether or not Stewart puts spaces before question marks in her text messages. Q So much of this film takes place “inside” a cellphone, so to speak. Is it an iMessage movie?
A I had the desire to make a movie that was simply one long conversation over text messages. That’s a bit of a stretch, and would get us into some kind of experimental area, which is not quite what I wanted. But I think that text messaging is a fascinating mode of communication. Because texting creates a relationship to words, to punctuation, and other very complex things – how long it takes to answer, how it feels when you’re waiting for an answer. It’s so complex, and it’s so charged, and the way we use the words is so careful. It’s very similar to poetry. Texting is the closest thing we have to poetry in everyday life – because all of a sudden every single word echoes in all of its meanings. Q What exactly is so engrossing about texting?
A I think any kind of text conversation is pretty intense. And it’s more intense than actual live conversation, which is mitigated by politeness and social conventions. Text messages are straight to the point: you verbalize things in a much clearer, straightforward way than you would do in conversation. In text messages it’s not wrapped. It’s raw. I always thought there was an intensity there – and we’re not even talking about sexting, but when you even get close to that area it’s disturbing. Q That’s fascinating dramatically. But what about aesthetically? How did you determine how the texting would look on-screen?
A To me it was obvious I was going to shoot the phones, to have the phone be held and used in close-up. I was not going to have those little pop-ups; I don’t like that at all. Because for me it has to do with the screen. If you disconnect the words from the screen, they don’t function the same way. Again, if you print the words, you don’t have the icons. You don’t have the waiting, you don’t get that kind of suspense. And that’s very specific – and addictive. Q We’re addicted to the suspense of waiting for messages to arrive?
A To all of it. I realized, even when I was I was shooting the phone footage, and we’d wait for the text to arrive on camera, I would think, is it coming, is it coming? And I liked the idea of movement. A lot of times we have inserts, closeups; some of them we did separately but a lot of them have to do with the movement and the way Kris- ten is typing. She used to say that it’s a movie where her thumbs are the co-star. The way she types is interesting. Q Did you instruct her to put a space before her question marks?
A No! She did it naturally. This is something that’s not part of English punctuation – it’s something you do in France. In French there’s a space. Q Oh. That makes sense. A No, it makes no sense! But yeah, I never told her, “change this,” “you misspelled this or that.” I thought that was all part of the process. Q I love this idea of turning off airplane mode and having the texts come through.
A That was part of the screenplay, yeah. I wanted the fear to rise. I like the idea of the text messages coming as a cascade. But it was difficult to get it right – we had to do it multiple times. And the version in the film, it’s the only moment that’s slowed down. There’s a slight slowmotion. Q There’s something poetic about technology and art mingling.
A Yes. Poetry is at the core of filmmaking. I’m saying that in the sense of the dramatic economy of filmmaking. Filmmaking, you don’t have the space that prose gives you. Q If movies are like poetry, and poetry is like texting...
A Cinema is like texting. It’s condensed. It has to be intense, and somehow it should be an intensity that radiates. What is exciting is what radiates – and the radiation comes from confronting things that are not supposed to be confronted, connecting things that should not be connected, mixing things that should not be mixed. Because all of a sudden it just creates something unexpected. It takes the viewer to another place. It’s about taking into account the relationship between the images and the viewer. Sometimes you give the viewer what he expects. Sometimes you don’t. Part of the excitement of filmmaking is in that game. I think that’s what poetry is about.
TEXTING IS THE CLOSEST THING WE HAVE TO POETRY IN EVERYDAY LIFE. — OLIVIER ASSAYAS, DIRECTOR (PERSONAL SHOPPER)