![‘Suspended Time’: Olivier Assayas on His Pandemic Time Capsule Drama & Not Fearing Technology [Interview]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/14071637/%E2%80%98Suspended-Time-Olivier-Assayas-on-His-Pandemic-Time-Capsule-Drama-Not-Fearing-Technology-Interview.jpg "‘Suspended Time’: Olivier Assayas on His Pandemic Time Capsule Drama & Not Fearing Technology [Interview]")
As the dog days of summer drift towards fall, serious cinephiles may already be turning their gaze toward the major film festival premieres. One such hotly anticipated title debuting at Venice will be Olivier Assayas’ “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” a political thriller set against the backdrop of Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in Russia. But don’t jump ahead too quickly—because just before then, Assayas’ American-based fans will have a chance to see the director’s previous feature, “Suspended Time,” when Music Box Films begins releasing it on August 15.
In typical Assayas fashion, his COVID lockdown-set feature feels nothing like any of his previous films. But, then again, no Assayas film feels like anything else in his filmography. It feels unfathomable that the French filmmaker is now a septuagenarian, given the way he continues pushing himself deeper into himself and more perceptively into the world at large.
Though Assayas’ recent output has grown more open in its desire to reflect the real world (“Non-Fiction”) and his relationship to cinema (the “Irma Vep” TV series), his “Suspended Time” makes little effort to disguise the auto-fictional elements of the story. With the benefit of some hindsight, Assayas takes contemporaneously recorded feelings and anecdotes he wrote down during the pandemic as his script. The film then stages these as a series of humorous and heartfelt episodes between his on-screen surrogate (Vincent Macaigne’s Paul Berger) and music critic brother (Micha Lescott’s Etienne Berger)—as well as their respective partners – in their French countryside home of their childhoods.
Assayas credits the period he documents in “Suspended Time” with revitalizing his creative process, but that doesn’t mean you should anticipate “The Wizard of the Kremlin” to maintain the inquisitive yet insightful breeziness that characterizes this film. “It’s a very different animal,” he quipped as I tried to tease out any connection between his soon-to-be-unveiled work. Assayas was much more forthcoming about the inspirations and impacts of “Suspended Time,” however, as we chatted over Zoom. Our conversation covered his relationship with ghosts, the past, and technology – as well as why he doesn’t fear making films on the contemporary side of the “iPhone line.”
You make mention of the ghosts of your parents and grandparents being present in “Suspended Time.” Do you think of ghosts in the same way here as you did in a film like “Personal Shopper?”
I mean, ghosts don’t really exist, so each of us has a different relationship to the past and therefore a different relationship to ghosts of the past. It can be benign, poetic, and also can be frightful. The thing that was important for me when I made “Suspended Time” was, somehow, to reconnect as much as I could with my own reality. As much as “Personal Shopper” is very close to me and intimate in many ways, it’s fiction. It’s moviemaking. It deals with things that are somewhat real, some are unreal, and some are total fantasy.
I wanted something, for once, when I made “Suspended Time,” that would be unimpeachably true. I suppose in that sense, [I was] exposing myself much more than I would in even in a movie like “Personal Shopper.” The ghosts of “Personal Shopper” are my ghosts, but they are fictional. When I made “Suspended Time,” it was my actual grandfather and grandmother. It’s the house where I grew up. The ghosts that haunt this house are different from the movie ghosts.
What did you gain from making the film with some distance and not making it as a diary?
It’s something that I’ve been toying with for a long time. I have represented in my movies, in one way or another, my parents’ house. It’s there in “Summer Hours,” “Cold Water,” and “Something in the Air.” I suspect that the house I only go to every once in a while was imposed on me during the lockdown period. I’m going to dive into the world of my childhood by spending time in that specific house and environment. Of course, a lot of memories came up. A lot of things that I had forgotten about all of a sudden just became part of my reality again. Something about my relationship with my brother was also revealed. We have always been very close, but we had not spent time together for decades.
I do think that the inspiration for “Suspended Time” is something that I had hoped would happen. It just came to me. Looking back on it, it gives me a feeling that it’s something that I had been looking for. It’s something that I needed to try and experiment. It somehow gave me the proof that I could do it. I was not so sure I could do it. To me, it’s in many ways an experimental film, but experimenting means figuring out if there’s new ground for you, potentially, in this or that direction.
I was so struck by the repeated image in “Suspended Time” of an iPhone nestled in vines. Is that your way of cheekily suggesting how a digital-age cinema can reconnect with nature?
This is very autobiographical, even if it’s comedy. I just found it interesting, and possibly funny, that you have those sessions with your therapist in the middle of a park in the spring and in the middle of the beauty of nature. In a certain way, I felt like I was degrading the beauty of the landscape by dealing with my anxieties [within it]. I don’t think that the iPhone disconnects us from reality. I don’t think they connect us with nature, and the potential they have to make photos and capture moments is something that can be used in a very poetic, very beautiful way. It’s not like it would be alienating. I never had a sense that using my iPhone to communicate with the world or to have Zoom interviews, exactly like we’re having now, is dehumanizing. It’s not the way I see it.
You’re one of the few filmmakers of your stature who don’t seem to be afraid on the other side of the iPhone line. How do you approach making technology feel cinematic?
To me, it’s very basic. Art, especially movies, has to deal with reality, and reality is constantly changing. It’s not a matter of updating yourself. It’s just the fact that what is exciting about reality is that it’s constantly morphing. It’s exciting to be in sync with whatever is going on in the culture, and I think I do it in a very modest way. The Internet, and specifically smartphones, connect you with the rest of the world. They open doors that were closed before. It’s a machine that is a continuation of the self. It’s like an additional memory there with me in my pocket. It’s a very fascinating instrument, and I think it’s one of the extraordinary miracles of modern life.
I mean, I hate when my daughter is spending hours on it, but I can’t deny that something is going on there that connects us with the world, with our own memories, with our knowledge, with awareness, with things we discover that we didn’t know about. So yes, it’s inspiring. I have a hard time understanding how you can make movies today without including whatever transformative effect smartphones have on our lives.
How did making this film — or experiencing this moment in history — change your relationship to the natural world? It can be both a life-giving force and ultimately something that will swallow up whatever humans have built, like we see nature beginning to reclaim various spaces in your childhood hometown.
It’s difficult to answer your question. David Hockney has always been a major inspiration because he’s such a great artist, and he’s reinventing himself in such fascinating ways. In his recent work, the iPad drawing he has made of flowers and vases, there is a mixture of modernity and something that is completely outside of time. The gracefulness with which he draws flowers in his iPad drawings using modern technology to do that is something that has been stimulating for me. It made me question my own relationship to my art and how my art is connected with nature or not, but I don’t think you can be disconnected from nature.
I grew up in the countryside, so I have a special relationship with the passing of seasons as a kid. I walked to school through the woods or on my bicycle, so I have memories of cold in winter, of heat in the summer, of blooming lilacs. It’s something that I had been repressing or considering was not worthy of my work as a filmmaker. But, gradually, I realized that it’s precious and healthy. The lockdown period brought back how important it was for me and how meaningful it was.
The nature of suspended time as a concept is one where the past and present are intermingled. Does that ability to toggle between tenses something you feel like something you get to do as a filmmaker?
Ultimately, it comes back to your question about ghosts. Nature is, at the same time, blooming and then withering before our own eyes. It’s at the same time the very nature of the present and comes from the past, and it has some eternity built into it. My own relationship is ambiguous because when I am visiting the park of my neighbor’s friends, it’s nature … but it’s nature groomed by a specific group of humans, who are the family that owns the land. Movies are inspired and nourished by your experience of the past, and somehow, they become contemporary when you are shooting. But when you are writing them, you are dependent on your memories, on things that were once and are not anymore or not, or that you are somehow trying to reconnect with in one way or another. It’s certainly about looking back, whereas the action of filmmaking, the moment of filmmaking when your camera is actually rolling and recording real life – and especially when you’re doing that in the middle of nature – you are absolutely in the present. You are in the instant that only the cinema can capture.
Cinema has specificity, and one of its specificities is the fact that it can record human emotions on the faces of the actors. And it can capture nature, as fleeting as it is. I think that the reason why I’ve been making movies and devoted my life to filmmaking is that there is magic built into that art. I grew up as a would-be painter when I was a teenager. Until I was in my mid-20s, I was convinced I would be a filmmaker and a painter. At some point, I had to adapt to the fact that you can’t seriously practice two arts, at least not for me. What attracted me to movies is something that stems from painting, and I, of course, instantly identify in my filmmaking what has been inspired by painting.
“Suspended Time” hits theaters August 15 via Music Box Films.
