And I do like to write about film once in a while. My recent pieces have been published in Film Comment. I wrote an homage to Wong Kar-wai, because they were giving him a prize in Lyon, France at the Lumière Festival. Then, I also wrote a piece about [Ingmar] Bergman’s 100th Anniversary. Writing essays about film has kind of stayed with me. I've been publishing stuff [mostly in] print. And then you have websites; they cohabit. There's no contradiction. But I don't read much stuff online. I mean, I read dailies. I read the New York Times, but I don't read movie magazines online much. It's because I'm used to paper, I suppose. To me, what is problematic in terms of how the Internet has changed film criticism is, now people walk out of the theater and they tweet. They want to be the first. They want to be the first to publish a piece. And it speeds the process too much. I think that’s wrong.

As far as I'm concerned, I need a couple of days to be exactly sure of what I think of the film. Not in terms of good or bad, but in terms of how it echoes with my own emotions. Sometimes, something that superficially would seem to work for me maybe fades after two days and it is not that interesting [anymore]. Or the opposite: something I resent, something that I feel disturbed by, I realize I kept thinking about it after a couple of days. What I am saying is, if you're talking about the process of writing about movies as some sort of art form, if you want to be in touch with your own emotions and your writing, you need a little time as opposed to be the first one to tweet when the credits are still rolling or something.

Guillaume Canet as Alain in "Non-Fiction"

In your cinema, especially in your later work, you seem to dig up and examine the dialogue between the past and present: whether it might be texting with a ghost or whether it’s clash between generations, ideologies or technologies ... You seem to be looking into how things evolve or fade and what change brings along.

[Non-Fiction] is very much about the process of change. In certain ways, it's more about that than anything else, ultimately. But when I am making a movie like “Clouds of Sils Maria,” it's very much about how actors have to adapt to a completely different media culture, which has been absolutely turned upside down by the Internet. Or when I make a movie like “Personal Shopper,” it's about how our connection with the fantasy world of the Internet makes us different persons, changes our values, and changes our metaphysics. In a certain sense, those movies are not about questioning the process of change, but they are about the actual effects of change in our lives, in our individuality, in our relationship to knowledge, to our world view. A character like Alain in the film, he's not a victim of change. He is one of the agents of change and he's weighing the pros and cons.