Olivier Assayas, the pandemic will change cinema and ourselves

 A lesson in cinema and life that Olivier Assayas, French director and son of art born in 1955, gave in the remote press meeting with the Lecce European Film Festival which awarded him the Golden Olive. Extremely cultured, multilingual, passionate about art, literature and the Orient, Assayas, former film critic (he was for the Cahiers du Cinéma) and then author of films such as SUMMER HOURS, SILS MARIA and PERSONAL SHOPPER, talks about everything and has even his personal recipe, he who is writing a film on the pandemic, on the cinema of the future. "The crisis in cinema has certainly been accelerated by the lockdown, but we must not make too much confusion. I am convinced - he said - that, when everything is over, young people will return to the cinema although perhaps in different ways. In short, cinema will have to redefine itself, not it will be more like before. There will be a period of collective and individual reinvention ". Regarding creativity, the pandemic and the lockdown, Assayas explained: "They were certainly a factor in accelerating the contemporary transformation of the world. People today are somewhat more lucid and at the same time dependent on modern communication systems. Think about it. only at this press conference on Zoom, which was unthinkable just a year ago. And then - added the director who speaks in perfect Italian - creativity in terms of writing, painting and music has had its triumph in this period in which the artists have dedicated more time to their art. We still had to deal with something unknown, historically unpublished that made everyone have to reinvent themselves ". The director, who is currently working for HBO on an eight-part TV series inspired by his IRMA VIP ("the only frustration is that you don't see it on the big screen") then talks about his relationship with Italy: "My father (Raymond Assayas, French Jewish screenwriter of Turkish origins, ed.) started me as a boy in classical Italian painting by showing me the works of Piero della Francesca and Giotto. And, despite being of French culture, also on the cinema front I was influenced more by Italian directors than by the French. I am thinking of authors such as Pasolini, Visconti, Rossellini and Antonioni ". On the recent events of Islamic terrorism in France, he said: "I am having difficulty in answering this type of question, but one thing is certain: I was very impressed by the massacre at the weekly Hebdo in 2015. These designers have been a bit 'the incarnation of all my youth. In my opinion the most important thing is the freedom of thinking and expression, two things that cannot be renounced ". The meaning of all his work marked by great eclecticism? "I have always seen all my films only as a way of looking at the world in different ways and from different perspectives. In short - Assayas concluded - in the face of the complexity of the world, I sought specific answers to universal questions".