Forget the Painting by Olivier Assayas, his life before cinema

The filmmaker recalls his training years as a painter before embracing a different destiny behind the camera after encountering the counterculture.

As a teenager, long before making his first films, Olivier Assayas started by doodling, painting, and drawing. In this short text of apprenticeship designed as a making-of, he reveals the construction of his artist’s personality to us. The principle of the collection “Traits et portraits” is to invite authors to confront autobiographical writing with illustrations.

Here, the director also showcases his first works, observes the evolution of his style and graphics, and remembers his concerns back then. Gradually, a universe is revealed, leading to his encounter with cinema as an intern on the set of a Richard Fleischer film, then writing adaptations of Maigret for his father, the screenwriter Jacques Rémy. The text becomes the story of a liberation, the story of a man who allows himself to escape from his destiny as a painter to choose another one.

It is probably not a coincidence that Assayas turned to painting. His maternal grandfather was the Hungarian painter Tibor Pólya, and his mother, a stylist for Hermès, also painted. Thus, the filmmaker does not just offer a purely theoretical analysis of his work. He reflects on his maternal and paternal heritage, dedicates beautiful pages to the memory of his elderly parents, and through fragments, tells us about his youth: the 1970s, trips to London, student life in Paris, and his discovery of the counterculture.

Oublier la peinture d’Olivier Assayas (Mercure/”Traits et portraits”), 160 p., 19. In bookstores on April 2.