With ‘Non-Fiction,’ Oliver Assayas crafts a sharp comedy about modern life

Reporting from Toronto —  The films of French writer-director Olivier Assayas often have a lot on their minds. From “Demonlover” and “Summer Hours” to the recent “Clouds of Sils Maria” and “Personal Shopper,” many of Assayas’ movies take on multiple ideas at once, circling different ways of examining contemporary life.

His new film, “Non-Fiction,” is at once a playful, funny view on relationships and a sharp examination of how technology is affecting all aspects of modern living.

Now playing in Los Angeles, the film stars Guillaume Canet as a book publisher struggling with the digital transformation overtaking his industry as he also finds himself drawn into an affair with a young female colleague (Christa Théret). Juliette Binoche plays his wife, an actress on a popular television series who is herself having an affair with an author her husband publishes (Vincent Macaigne). The author, in turn, frequently uses his own infidelities as creative inspiration, much to the dismay of his wife (Nora Hamzawi), a political consultant.

Assayas’s two previous films, “Clouds of Sils Maria” and “Personal Shopper,” both featured American actress Kristen Stewart and each managed to make more than $1 million at the U.S. box office. “Non-Fiction” premiered last fall at the Venice Film Festival before making an impressive swoop through festivals in Telluride, Toronto, New York and Los Angeles. Assayas sat down to talk about the film while he was at the Toronto International Film Festival.

To begin, can you talk about the distinction between the English title “Non-Fiction” and the French title “Double Vies,” which translates as “Double Lives”?

It’s a very banal story. I wrote the film under another title; it was called “E-Book.” Everybody thought it was too technical and a little bit cold and didn’t exactly look like the film. But it helped me a lot when I was writing; it was kind of a rhyme, in a certain way. So I agreed, but I had no other idea for a title.

One day I had a phone call saying the guy who’s doing the international sales is printing his catalog, so you have to come up with the title. Please, come up with a title. And I said, “Oh, OK.” And I came up with “Non-Fiction,” which I liked and which reflected whatever the film is. And so I thought I was happy with that.

A few weeks passed and they said, well, now the French distributor is really concerned because “Non-Fiction” doesn’t mean a thing in French; it doesn’t work. So I had to come up with another title, which became “Double Vies,” which again works very well with the film. And that’s the reason why for the discrepancy.

The movie feels very plugged in to issues that people are dealing with right now, how technology integrates into their lives. What was it that made you want to make a film so explicitly about contemporary problems?

I think if I try to analyze it, what I wanted to do from the start was a movie about how the world is changing and how we adapt or not to the ways the world is changing, and seen through the lens of the publishing world. Because obviously it’s one of the areas most affected by the digital transformation during the last 10 years.

That’s why I liked the idea of “E-Book” ... that people start thinking in terms of full digitalization, that e-books are the future. And gradually you realize ... it’s not going to replace books that people actually care about — the physicality of a book. E-books were just a new invention, but not the totality of the future. Which gave for me an interesting twist on the notion of change. ... It’s kind of important to stick to what will stay the same as much as you embrace the future.

The movie is set in the publishing world, but is it sort of actually about the film business?

No, it’s about every single possible job. I mean, you’re a barman, you’re a plumber, you’re a whatever — you are affected by the digital transformation of the world. I had a problem with the sink at my place and the plumber came and he took a photo of the broken element in the sink and he researched it on the Internet and he found it and he ordered it. And he got it the next day. And it happened to be, for some reason, an Italian thing, so 10 years ago he would not have traced it.

But what I am saying is that every single person in every single possible job is affected by what has been going on in terms of how the digital revolution has changed the way we function. Of course, in cinema it has already happened in major ways. In cinema, it happened with sound in the ’90s, in the early to mid-’90s. All of a sudden you had digital sound, which killed traditional sound editing and opened up incredible new spaces for the sound of movies. And then the image became digital and then the distribution of the films became digital. And in 10 years’ time, the world of cinema has completely changed.

The movie is much funnier than a lot of your recent work. What made you want to approach this story as a comedy?

I realized I had fun writing the scenes, and gradually that fun kind of translated into the style of the film. But the reason why it turned into a comedy ... I suppose it’s part of what I learned when I was making “Irma Vep”: When I made “Irma Vep,” which is a movie about the deep changes in cinephile culture at that time, ... I realized that I could get away with serious ideas in films as long as it was presented in a humorous way.

And I think “Non-Fiction” is a movie about how people in their everyday life, in their everyday conversation, are involved in big ideas — in abstract, complex ideas. It was possible to represent that as long as you used characters your audience would care for, and if there was some kind of tongue-in-cheek approach as opposed to some kind of straightforward, serious lecture.

“Non-Fiction” is a traditional kind of French relationship movie with lots of talking, but one of the main things they’re talking about is digital transformation. Did you think of it as if you were making two films at the same time?

Yes, but part of my inspiration was this [1993] movie by Eric Rohmer called “L’arbre, le maire et la Mediatheque” — “The Tree, the Mayor and Mediatheque,” I don’t know what the American word is for that — which, I thought it was hilarious. But simultaneously it dealt with the transformation of French society at that time, and in a certain way I liked the idea of making a movie that dealt with society as I perceived it around me. You know, why not make movies with stuff that is our everyday conversation or the questions we constantly try to deal with and with the stuff we are trying to make sense of?

Movies don’t function like that usually because of the time lapse between the moment you imagine a movie and the moment it’s on the screen. It takes you quite a while to write it and then to get it financed and get your cast, shoot it, edit it and four years have passed. So all of a sudden the idea you had is already four years old at the moment it ends up onscreen.

I like the idea of trying to squeeze that time lapse and trying to make something that can still be part of the conversation ... where the audience could be part of the debate.

And I have to say, the world of the movie, the apartments and bars and restaurants in Paris where it all takes place, all look fantastic.

When it’s between two locations, the ugly location and the good-looking location are basically the same price. So usually you go for the better-looking one.

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