Ep. 306: Olivier Assayas on his film Suspended Time, personal filmmaking, and recent favorites

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw, with your host, Nicolas Rapold. This weekend, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema presents the latest Olivier Assayas film, Suspended Time—a thoughtful and funny chronicle set in the French countryside during pandemic lockdown. Set in Assayas’s parents’ house, it’s about much more, circling his relationship with his rock critic brother—whom he isolated with, along with their partners—and the feelings of reckoning with mortality and the past that are stirred up. I spoke with Assayas when Suspended Time originally premiered in Berlin about fictionalizing his experience, the introspection of the pandemic, the directors that influenced him, his recent viewing, and where his Irma Vep series fit into all of this. Vincent Macaigne (also in the Irma Vep series) and Micha Lescot co-star as the brothers Assayas.

Suspended Time screens March 14 and 16 at Film at Lincoln Center as part of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2025.

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Photo by Steve Snodgrass