• Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria

Today Clouds of Sils Maria begins its first Chicago run at the Landmark Century and the River East 21. To my taste, it’s writer-director Olivier Assayas’s most invigorating feature since Demonlover (2002), and like that film, it suggests a continuation of his early work as a film critic, commenting on particular filmmakers and the current state of cinema as a whole. Juliette Binoche stars as an actress with similarities to herself, a world-renowned thespian who’s also appeared in trivial Hollywood blockbusters. The movie finds her creatively and personally frustrated in middle age. Her closest relationship appears to be with her young personal assistant (Kristen Stewart, who recently won a César award—France’s equivalent of the Oscars—for her performance), and even that relationship is contentious. Assayas uses the characters’ feelings about art to develop how they feel about each other. In one of the most provocative sequences, the two realize how differently they see the world as they debate the cultural merits of superhero movies, perhaps the first serious discussion of such to appear in an art film.

Ultimately I wanted Juliette to revisit what she was going through when we were making that film, but from the other side of the mirror. That film was so much about the path of an actress. How do you end up being ready for a major part and, more generally, for something that’s been your calling? Here, it’s more about revisiting that [experience], how you look back on it and try to find the same passion after time has transformed you.

I think it helps the actors to have long takes, since they have more space, more time. You end up getting something stronger and more personal from them. So I’ll structure a scene by shooting a very long, complex shot that covers most of the action. Then I’ll do a countershot that picks up whatever wasn’t in the initial tracking shot. André always shot the shots and countershots simultaneously, but I usually shoot them separately, because, in my taste, that allows for more complexity when I intercut.

I believe that movies should be about questions, not about answers. I don’t have answers. It would be great if I did, but . . . I think one of the best things you can do as a filmmaker is just show the world in its complexity. And the more you show complexity, the closer you are to something that everybody relates to. In terms of how you react to blockbuster movies or just how the world is changing, I think most of us would say, well, there’s good and bad. I like it and I don’t like it. I understand it, but I don’t understand it.

I started making movies after the death of Francois Truffaut, but I would have loved for him to have seen my films. Even if he didn’t like them, I wouldn’t care. He’s certainly the one French filmmaker whose judgment would have been important to me, and I missed it.