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Kristen Stewart brings a personal touch

Craig Mathieson
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"I like the idea of a film being something you share in the cinema. You can be alone in the crowd and still be a part of this collective experience," director Olivier Assayas says.

"The core of the cinema experience," he adds, "is how the film echoes within. Every single viewer somehow transforms the movie they've seen and makes something else out of it."

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Trailer: Personal Shopper

Revolves around a ghost story that takes place in the fashion underworld of Paris.

Sitting in his Paris office recently, having just dropped his daughter with wife and fellow French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love off at her school, Assayas is in an expansive mood. A career that unofficially began four decades ago, when he ghostwrote television scripts assigned to his ailing father, Raymond, has moved from cult status to international acclaim. His last two films, 2014's Clouds of Sils Maria and now Personal Shopper, which both feature the American actor Kristen Stewart in remarkably unforced performances, feel startlingly contemporary.

"When you film a scene your audience is going to see what you film plus other things that come from their own memories or their perception of the world," the 62-year-old says. "You have to be aware when you're making a film that whatever you're doing will have something on top of it."

A horror film without any of the genre's conventions, Personal Shopper is a picture full of connections viewed through the lens of alienation. Kristen Stewart's Maureen is the Paris-based personal assistant to a prickly German celebrity constantly moving from one transaction to the next, whether she's picking up designer outfits or trying to connect to the spirit of her twin brother, Lewis, who died several months previously due to a heart defect.

Assayas never remembers the plots of the films he loves, let alone specific scenes. What remains with him is the emotion they raised in him. Like Maureen, whose grief at her loss has cut her off from the world but made her painfully open to new possibilities, Personal Shopper has an inexplicable momentum and deep dives into netherworlds made palpable by Stewart's offhand conviction.

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"It's certainly a movie that's more concerned with emotion and how those emotions interconnect and how they take on a life of their own rather than being a forward narrative," Assayas says. "It's more like a painting: a line here, a line there, or a colour here and a colour there. I approach the film like an abstract canvas."

The movie is full of ghostly creations, from malevolent spirits to black economy jobs that don't formally exist, and what repeatedly links them to Maureen is technology. She has a long texting exchange, while on a train to London, with an unknown entity that wants to possess her, while later there's a Hitchcock-worthy moment when Maureen turns on her phone and a rush of pent up messages suggest a looming threat.

"I'm not interested in how the smart phone functions, I'm interested in how the human brain functions," Assayas says, speaking as his email in-box intermittently beeps in the background. "The film is seen through the eyes of someone who is very much alone, yet not that alone because it is a modern loneliness which is inhabited by communication."

The movie's unease is also channelled into scenes of transformation, as Maureen secretly tries on the designer outfits – and the life – of her employer, and Stewart turns the camera, Assayas, and ultimately the audience into a co-conspirator. The 26-year-old, who won a Cesar – the French equivalent of an Academy Award – for Clouds of Sils Maria has remade her career in company with Assayas.

"I am interested in the person Kristen as opposed to the movie star Kristen. I think that's why we function so well together because she likes that process. I strip her of the layers of notoriety and celebrity so she is the raw genuine person she is."

Their key moment, Assayas believes, occurred in the European summer of 2013, when Clouds of Sils Maria was in pre-production. Assayas, who does not like detailing characters or their backgrounds for his actors, told the former Twilight star all she needed for the film was to be herself. As he began writing Personal Shopper he saw Stewart as Maureen, and credits her as the movie's true inspiration because he was so intent on working with her again.

"What is important to the casting decision is that you're convinced there's a connection between what you have imagined and that actor. But they don't have to superimpose," Assayas says. "The character will give the actor the opportunity to do something they haven't done, and the actor will bring something of their own identity that will breathe life into what is a shadow.

"Kristen has an extraordinary relationship with the camera," he adds.  "In certain shots she is both the actor and viewer in the sense that she has such an intense knowledge of what is attractive for a viewer. She reinvents the shot by connecting it with the eye of the viewer. I genuinely think she directed the film from the inside and I directed the film from the outside."

Assayas, who is currently working on a French language project he hopes to finish and shoot later this year, has often made films where employment is tenuous or even dangerous, but his own career for the most part is assured. His films, like his casts, have an international appeal, although the handful of scenes in Personal Shopper that required computer-generated imagery was enough to remind him what he enjoys.

"I needed to do it and in the end I'm happy with it, but I do not like the process and I will not be making a special effects movie," he says, laughing. "I have this idealised notion that the cinema will stay around and I need to feel that what I do will have a long life."

Personal Shopper opens on  April 13.