Youth in Revolt: Olivier Assayas on Something in the Air

My conversation with Olivier Assayas, the mercurial director of Boarding Gate (sadomasochistic thriller), Irma Vep (movie meta-satire) and 2010's Carlos (epic terrorist biopic), turns out to be as urgent and breathless as the film in discussion, his new feature Something in the Air. The Frenchman is in London, speaking to me on his mobile from the back of a black cab while on his way to see a play featuring an actor he’s interested in for a future project. "I’m trying in the film to revive something, the energies of an era," he tells me, the west-end traffic audible over the crackling phone line. The era he's speaking of is Paris in the early 70s, specifically as witnessed by teenage firebrands coming-of-age in the wake of 1968's generation defining strikes. "I’m trying to recreate it in ways that reflect not just the fantasy of those years, but the way they actually were," he adds. "The conflicts, the contradictions, the complexities of it."

The film follows 16-year-old Gilles (Clément Métayer) and several of his friends as they try to fill the ‘68 generation's awfully big shoes. A cursory glance at Assayas's bio reveals that he too missed out on the student sit-ins (he was 13 in 1968). Can we assume, then, that Gilles' story is close to Assayas's own formative years? "It's pretty close. The story of Gilles is very specifically close to whatever has been my own strange path towards the cinema." Like Gilles, Assayas's initial mode of expression was abstract art. "As a teenager, I was doing very naïve paintings, but along the way I kind of developed an understanding that what cinema – independent cinema – was about was maybe more exciting because it connected you to reality. It represented human emotion."

Over the course of Something in the Air, young Gilles morphs from mop-haired rioter to runner on an exploitation film featuring Nazis, Amazon women and papier-mâché sea monsters. In any other movie this career development would be scoffed at – another anarchist joining the petite bourgeoisie. Not so for Assayas, who himself found freedom of artistic expression by rejecting the collectivism of politics. "Now with the perspective of time we idealise the political involvement of that generation," he explains, "but that political involvement was also connected to a lot of very rigid, very dogmatic, very mistaken ideas. Specifically in France you had Maoists who were really supporting the worst kind of totalitarian government. What I'm trying to remind people of is that there was a debate, nothing was clear cut. The politics were very conflicted."

Speaking to Assayas, it’s clear that his early experiences in film were very conflicted also. "I ended up in the craziest places," he laughs (his first gig was as a trainee at Pinewood working on Richard Donner’s Superman (1978)). "It was really striking when you were growing up in that era [70s/80s] how the film industry was disconnected from what you were experiencing. I’m not even talking about the politics: I’m talking about the art, the counter-culture, the music. I mean, it was all happening and it was so powerful and it was so exciting to be part of that. Then when I went to my day job, in the film industry, it felt so disconnected from the real world."

Something in the Air shares the same balmy cinematography as other 70s set coming-of-age films (Almost Famous, Dazed and Confused, Super 8), but what sets it apart is Assayas's refusal to wallow in the warm embrace of nostalgia. "Youth is really frustration. You are looking for your own identity; you are looking for your place in society. It’s a time of doubt, of insecurity. I was happy to be rid of it, really."