Assayas, Olivier

(1955- )

   Actor, critic, director, and screen-writer. Olivier Assayas is the son of director Jacques Rémy, so Assayas was born into film, in a manner of speaking. He began his career making short films, such as Copyright (1979), Rectangle (1979), and Laissé inachevé à Tokyo (1982). Assayas then went on to work on film from the critical and theoretical side. He was an editor for Cahiers du cinéma from 1980 to 1986, and he gained particular recognition for the journal's special issue on Hong Kong cinema, a foreign cinema that would later influence his own filmmaking.

   From the mid-1980s, Assayas moved to screenwriting. He worked on the scripts of André Téchiné's Rendez-vous (1985), Le lieu du crime (1986), and Alice et Martin (1998), before trying his hand at directing feature-length films. His debut feature was Désordre (1986), followed by L'enfant de l'hiver (1989). His third feature, Paris s'éveille (1991), won the Prix Jean-Vigo in 1992.

   His film Irma Vep (1995), based on the character from the Louis Feuillade silent film serial Les Vampires (1915), was also widely acclaimed. This film stars Hong Kong action heroine Maggie Cheung, whom Assayas married. To date, he has been nominated for the Palme d'or at the Cannes Film Festival for three films: the period piece Les destinées sentimentales (2000), the cyber thriller Demonlover (2002), and the drama Clean (2004), which casts Cheung as the lead. His other feature films include Une nouvelle vie (1993), L'eau froide (1994), and Fin d'août, début septembre (1999). He also directed a documentary on the prominent Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, titled HHH, un portrait de Hou Hsiao-Hsien (1997).