Original subtitles

In 1984, Olivier Assayas and Charles Tesson went to Hong Kong.

As critics for Cahiers du Cinéma, the film journal,

they were researching a special issue on Asian cinema.

For our generation

of Cahiers du Cinema writers, the big adventure back then

was discovering that unknown continent.

A major trigger

was Serge Daney's trip to Asia.

- For a Hong Kong paper. - For a Hong Kong paper.

He went to Hong Kong, the Philippines and Peking to see Mao's grave.

He also visited the Shaw studios, I think.

Yes, he met lots of people.

He didn't establish a detailed cartography of Asian cinema,

but he did map out a few main roads.

We used his experience as a starting point and built on it

when we travelled out there.

It was all about discovering popular Asian cinema.

There's one thing you need to know.

Although Asian cinema was recognised in the West to a certain extent,

people were only interested in the noble genres.

Although they knew a bit about Japanese or Indian cinema

through Satyajit Ray and a few Bengali directors like Mrinal Sen,

they were totally ignorant of popular Asian cinema.

That was strikingly true of popular Hong Kong cinema.

But the French like popular films, too.

Yes, Bruce Lee's films were shown in mainstream cinemas.

That's right.

But historically, Bruce Lee

was Asian cinema's proponent.

To put things in context without going over his life and work in detail,

Bruce Lee had a Western culture.

He lived in San Francisco and Hong Kong.

He was the one who brought

Chinese Kung Fu films to the street.

But he didn't do Kung Fu. He did a hybrid of Western combat

and Eastern combat techniques.

I don't know what it's called, but it has a name.

Yes, it's mixed with Korean style.

It's a hybrid.

Bruce Lee also brought a form of neo-realism

to Chinese action films.

His characters spoke Cantonese and they were on the street.

Until then, Hong Kong cinema had been inspired by China's history.

Most films were in Mandarin, the language of mainland China.

And they were about Chinese history and the fantasy world

of Hong Kong immigrants who remembered China.

Bruce Lee was a guy from the streets who had to fight to survive.

So he became a role model for Chinese people all over the world.

And in a way, he also became the star of the oppressed throughout the world.

Bruce Lee's global success is the success of the loner

who's broken away from his community

and fights to exist in the Western world.

So you went to Hong Kong in the summer of 1984.

Just the two of you,

with very little money.

We shared a hotel room.

You only had a vague idea of what you would find.

When we got there, we were

like French journalists in 1950s Hollywood.

We'd seen films, but didn't know how to classify them.

We knew roughly who had made what.

But who were they really? What was their story?

What bits of their work had reached us?

Were they the right ones or not?

Who produced films and why? What was successful and what wasn't?

What part did the industry play in the economy?

So, we were faced with one of the last virgin territories of cinema.

We can call it the last virgin continent of cinema.

So we were very curious to map it out.

We were lucky.

We arrived at a time where we could see the three forms of Hong Kong cinema.

The classic cinema of the Shaw brothers and Chu Yuan was still around.

Chu Yuan was still making films.

- It was the end. - But the Shaw studios were still there.

There was something left of that era, but it was the end.

Golden Harvest was doing really well producing Bruce Lee films.

And Jackie Chan was making lots of films.

That was already a reinvention of classic Kung Fu films.

Yes, Kung Fu comedy.

We were already seeing the new generation,

which would later give us John Woo and others.

- We saw all three genres at once. - Absolutely,

because we arrived at the time of the big studio crisis.

Just like in Hollywood in the 1950s, the studio system was collapsing.

That's why people became interested in films. It was time to take stock

and witness a modern revival of cinema.

In Hong Kong, the studio system was collapsing.

The people involved in that form of cinema had to face the fact

that it didn't work anymore.

There were younger directors

who usually came from Western film schools.

These directors were what was called at the time

the new wave of Hong Kong cinema.

They were people whose films we'd seen at festivals,

like Tsui Hark, Ann Hui, Allen Fong, Patrick Tam and a few others.

You really talk about it as critics and film lovers.

But I'd also like to know what kind of professional commitment...

What do you think of the industry as professionals rather than viewers?

I see things slightly differently.

But what you say is quite true.

What was fascinating for us at the time

was to see what the classic age of cinema was.

The Shaw brothers and, to a lesser extent, Golden Harvest

represent the classic age of Chinese cinema.

Just as the Hollywood studio system represents

the classic age of American cinema.

An age where the system itself

produced a certain level of quality yet naivety about the whole thing.

And because of that, almost unwittingly,

a lot of rather good films were produced.

In the West, that didn't exist anymore.

The modern crisis of Western cinema happened much earlier -

in the 1960s.

Chinese cinema was so insular in those days.

It communicated so little with the rest of the world

that its crisis happened twenty years later

than it did in the West.

As a film-maker, I don't feel close to that form of cinema.

I feel close to the Taiwanese new wave,

what was called the new Taiwanese cinema.

I was lucky to come across it then.

At the end of our Hong Kong journey,

Charles and I shared the territory, so to speak.

After seeing the people we wanted to meet in Hong Kong,

Charles went to the People's Republic of China. He went to Canton.

He studied much more closely than me

the links between Chinese and Hong Kong cinema.

This is a neglected, fascinating side to the origins of Hong Kong cinema.

Meanwhile I met a young man called Chen Kuo-fu

who was a critic of Taiwanese cinema at the time.

He was very young like us and wrote for one of the main Taiwanese papers.

He said, "You're from the Cahiers ? What are you doing in Hong Kong,

"interviewing all these old farts who make naff films?

"The only interesting thing happening in Asia

"is what's happening in Taiwan."

In Taiwan, martial law was collapsing.

And you could see the first openings which would allow a modern cinema

reflecting a society which was in crisis at the time.

A cinema which went some way towards freedom.

I believed him.

So I got all the paperwork I needed to go to Taipei,

which was no mean feat in those days.

When you got there, it was like an Eastern country.

- You mean it wasn't Western? - That's right.

It was a kind of military dictatorship.

I stayed at Chen Kuo-fu's house and slept on the floor.

He organised a screening day for me and introduced me to directors.

I saw Hou Hsiao-Hsien's and Edward Yang's first films.

There were also the first films by a couple of other directors.

And some directors made films together.

New Taiwanese cinema started with films made up of sketches.

Because there were lots of directors, but very little money.

So they made joint films.

I met Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Edward Yang and Christopher Doyle

who was cinematographer on Edward Yang's film

and later worked with Wong Kar-wai.

These people had reached a stage in their career,

not quite like mine because I hadn't made any films.

I hadn't made any feature films yet.

But like me, they wanted to make contemporary films

that dealt with their changing world.

Their outlook was the same as mine.

In fact, the friends I've kept from my time in China

are this community of Taiwanese directors.

I've carried on talking to them

much more as a film-maker than a critic.

Irma Vep also shows your relationship with French cinema

via Feuillade and that's completely at odds with Taiwanese cinema.

Irma Vep is really

about one thing only - being in the presence of brilliance.

It's a comedy about brilliance

and whether you see it or not.

What I like most about the film is that it's a game

where the viewer is asked to get involved.

There's another important issue in that film.

I think Maggie represents something which has to do with pure cinema.

That brilliance is often right under your nose in films or real life,

and you're either capable of seeing it or not. That's really what Irma Vep is about.

Brilliance has come and gone. Who saw it and who didn't?

The viewer gets involved, too.

The film is more about that than anything else.

The link with Asia is embodied by Maggie.

I would say that the story of brilliance,

the essence of cinema,

is spontaneously present

in the classic age, in the origins of cinema.

The silent era was great.

Everything was being filmed for the first time.

There was such a pure way of looking at things which was wonderful.

It's just like the Italian Renaissance.

All of a sudden, people open their eyes and see the world for the first time.

When you see a tree painted by Giotto, you're bowled over

because it looks like the first tree ever seen by man.

When the Lumiere brothers filmed a tree, it was the same.

Their tree had the same beauty.

When it comes to fiction and the fantasy worlds of men,

the films of Feuillade and other directors of serials of that era

have the same spontaneous innocence and beauty.

I don't think Feuillade realised the beauty of what he was filming.

He was trying to invent.

Likewise, we can't be sure that the Lumiere brothers

were fully aware of what they were doing.

But can this most beautiful thing that cinema can produce

carry on being achieved?

And how can someone who makes films today achieve

this thing that they're striving for, but which often eludes them?

I think it can only be passed on through humans.

Through things that shine through people.

Irma Vep wouldn't exist if two years before making it

I hadn't been introduced to Maggie at the Venice festival.

Looking back on it, I can say it was love at first sight.

I fell in love with her at once, but I didn't see it like that at the time.

I saw her as someone who carries in her

a form of pure, naive beauty.

I felt I'd found the very key to what I was looking for in cinema.

But you'd already seen films...

- Starring Maggie? - Yes.

Yes, but here I'm talking in non-cinematic terms.

I'd really liked Maggie in films,

but what mattered to me was who she was in real life.

In real life, she was so much better.

Her presence was infinitely more radiant in real life

than in any of the great films I'd seen her in.

That's why you wanted to work with her.

Exactly. And I thought

if I could put on film what I saw, it would be worth it just for that.

You knew you wanted to cast a Chinese actress.

Yes, because Maggie was the inspiration...

Maggie was the inspiration behind the character.

But she seemed inaccessible.

Everyone was telling me she'd retired,

she'd left Hong Kong and didn't like cinema.

The message was, "Forget it."

So I accepted the idea that Maggie would never be in this film.

But she'd inspired it and that was already a lot.

So I went to Hong Kong to meet potential actresses for the part.

I thought there might be other interesting actresses after all.

I met all the Chinese film stars of the time.

I was close to despair because I thought no one

could even vaguely play the character.

It wasn't about casting just any Chinese film star.

I needed that unique person who radiated what I was after.

So I was in a real pickle.

I spoke to Chris Doyle with whom I'd kept in touch

and who later became Wong Kar-wai's cinematographer.

He happened to be there at the time.

He kept travelling between Paris and Taipei,

because he had a girlfriend in Paris.

When I made Disorder, my first film,

Chris was assistant cameraman or grip

and helped with the smoke machine.

Anyway, we remained very good friends.

So one day, we had a drink together

and he said, "Why don't you call Maggie?"

I said, "I've no idea how.

"Everyone tells me she's uncontactable."

So he said, "I'm having a drink with her later. I'll talk to her if you like.

"And maybe tomorrow or tonight, we can all meet up."

He called me later and said she was very happy to meet me.

So I met Maggie in a very noisy bar in Hong Kong.

We could hardly hear each other.

She didn't seem at all hostile to making a film in France.

I think we gave her the script the next morning before our flight.

Two clays later, she called me and said, "I've read the script.

"L'd like to do it." It was as simple as that.

You came back from Hong Kong and your special issue came out...

In September...

1984.

It was a monumental flop,

panned by the critics, particularly in Le Monde.

Yes, that's right.

They did a four-line nasty review which left its mark on me.

The reviews were very negative and the editors at the Cahiers didn't care.

It was as if that episode was nothing to do with them.

We were on our own. With time, things improved.

But at the time people couldn't understand

our interest in Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan.

Things have changed, but at the time it went against the tide.

Yes, I remember I wrote an article

about Chang Cheh's work and I was happy with it.

But I might as well have pissed in the wind.

It didn't leave a single trace in the collective memory of the Cahiers.

Later, the young generations loved the Shaw season, which was good.

But in the early days, it was tough.

Our special issue sold so badly and there were so many copies left

that our bosses had them bound to try to sell more.

- It must be out of print now. - Yes, it carried on selling.

We check the sales every year.

It's interesting to track year after year

the waves of interest in Asian cinema.

That issue became the reference book in French.

Even in English, there was nothing at the time

which came close to what we'd done.

And I've always regretted, you too, I'm sure,

that they didn't include our dictionary.

The editor in chief wouldn't include the dictionary of Hong Kong cinema

that we'd written.

That dictionary gave an overview of Hong Kong cinema.

It complemented our issue which was still very comprehensive.

Looking back, it included all the facets...

Including Cantonese melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s.

In the Mood for Love

was inspired by that genre which is still unknown in France.

In France, there's this idea that Hong Kong cinema was 'discovered much later,

but its golden age was never discovered.

The great directors are still unknown.

In your film, the journalist praises John Woo.

It's like loving Peckinpah without having seen John Ford's films.

We've always found that annoying.

At the time, we organised an event

which was a miracle then.

We organised a kind of season of Hong Kong films.

We'd found incredible copies of films which had never been seen

and have remained unseen.

We organised two weeks of screenings at an independent cinema in Paris.

And there was only a miserable handful of viewers.

We were showing these films to empty theatres.

Today, people fight to see these films.

The restored copies are now shown in Nantes or other places.

Then Canal Plus showed some Jackie Chan films

and Ching Siu-tung's Chinese Ghost Story.

Then little by little, Chinese cinema gained recognition.

But the classics we screened then

never resurfaced anywhere else.

There was a strange film I liked, Killer Constable.

It was magnificent, but was never seen again.

It was already a rarity at the time.

So, as you can see, we have

some regret at not being recognised at the time.

But posterity has avenged us.

Because those early films are now considered

to have started the interest in Hong Kong cinema.

I have a philosophical notion of our relationship with Asia.

For me, Asia is the other great civilisation.

When it comes to art and cinema, I think there's an idea...

There's a conception of art which is specifically Chinese.

And that's what is most enriching for me.

I think that conception is the same as the one which inspired impressionism.

These painters saw Japanese prints,

they saw all the things that came to Europe in the late 19th century

when Japan was fashionable because it was much more open than China.

In fact, what came from China via Japan

left its mark on artists.

Through Chinese art, they were able to form a totally pure relationship

with nature, landscape, colour and light.

I've always been interested in China from that point of view.

It's almost the opposite for me.

For me the starting point was the film.

Chinese books, Chinese thinking came later.

Before that came my love for very basic Hong Kong films.

I love sport and cinema.

That's why I loved Hong Kong films.

Like the Armanet brothers.

Yes, except I don't do martial arts.

I like combat and action films.

I discovered later that martial arts were about much more than just sport.

But back then I thought, "There's a sport which creates a genre

"that tells China's story."

Football or tennis never did that.

That's what got me hooked and then I discovered China.

I had a more complex relationship with India than China.

Having said that, when we wrote our special issue,

what made our work on Hong Kong cinema unusual and good, I hope,

was placing it in the historical context.

We talked about Hong Kong's political history.

And we put cinema within the context of Chinese art.

In the article I wrote on King Hu,

I tried to place King Hu within Chinese art.

I thought it was right. You only have to listen to him talk.

That's all he talks about.

So it was the obvious thing to do. In the same way

I had fun building up a rather revealing genealogy.

It linked the history of the temple of Shaolin

and that of the introduction of Buddhism in China

to the first stars of Hong Kong cinema

and even to the directors of its classic age.

I showed this constant relationship from teacher to student.

I set out a kind of genealogy.

Maybe it was playful, but it was revealing.

It linked Liu Chia-liang who was the John Ford of Kung Fu films

to the monks of Shaolin

and the founder of the Shaolin monastery.

If you're interested

in Chinese martial arts films,

there are a few essential facts which most people aren't aware of.

These facts are the real key.

The rivalry between Buddhism and Taoism,

between Shaolin and Wu Tang thinking,

and the notions of Jiang Hu and Wulin,

which are the imaginary worlds of martial arts and fantasy tales.

Those are the parallel worlds in which the stories unfold

in this cinema genre.

And these worlds are coded.

So if you don't understand what they and their codes are,

you miss a lot of the meaning and depth of the films.

In Made in Hang Kong, Olivier did the brilliant genealogy

of Shaolin and the whole dynasty.

In his study, he has huge charts of all Chinese civilisations.

From your dad?

Yes, my dad brought them back.

Family history played a part, too.

I probably see meaning in things that don't have any meaning.

When I was little, my father used to travel to China when few people did.

He wrote films and was planning a monumental project,

a film based on Marco Polo's life and journey.

It was meant to be shot in spectacular conditions

and produced by his friend Raoul Lévy

who had produced And God Created Woman.

Alain Delon was meant to star in it and Christian-Jacque was going to direct.

You take what you can get.

The whole thing collapsed before it happened.

But my father was always travelling to Asia and bringing back artefacts.

Sol imagine

that my familiarity with or curiosity for China

must have stemmed from that.

How do you see China in the film?

Through Maggie and through the clips from Johnnie To's Heroic Trio...

with Michelle Yeoh and Maggie that crop up in Irma Vep.

We talk about 1984 to 1996 in relation to Olivier's Made in Hang Kong.

But it's interesting to see Irma Vep today,

now that Hong Kong cinema has spread throughout the world,

including the United States.

Irma Vep is so different from other films.

Olivier takes a group of actresses and an action film.

He makes references to popular French cinema.

He casts Bulle Ogier,

so we think of Rivette's Celine and Julie and then she criticises the film.

- Is that right? - Yes.

When I first saw the film, I knew where the journalist came from.

Olivier had him praise John Woo and trash boring art-house French films.

I could see Olivier's annoyance in that scene with the journalist.

He sees John Woo's films without having seen the directors that came before him.

And then he compares Hong Kong cinema to another genre.

Where the film excels is that Hong Kong cinema has spread worldwide

through a certain type of action film and video game.

And Olivier does exactly what the journalist says.

He shows you can combine French cinema inspired by the New Wave...

The couple made up of Nathalie Richard who's an emblem of French cinema

and Maggie who symbolises Hong Kong cinema

is a beautiful osmosis to watch.

Olivier pulls off this combination of Hong Kong and traditional French cinema.

This was original then and hasn't been done since.

The film is prophetic. It says, "China and Hong Kong are coming."

But no one has done the same since.

So the film is unconventional in that it was inspired by Hong Kong cinema

and Hong Kong cinema then spread throughout the world.