When I met Olivier Assayas in Paris during UniFrance , I could tell even from a distance where was he from. He was as French as only a Parisian could be, wearing a designed scarf with toned clothes and shoes. But when we started to talk, it turned out that I shouldn’t have judged a book by its cover. What made Assayas different from the other French filmmakers I'd had the chance to meet was his way of smiling all the time, even when we talked about very serious things, like spirituality and ghosts.

That's what his latest film Personal Shopper is about. Kristen Stewart plays Maureen, a celebrity's personal shopper who receives text messages of mysterious origin, possibly from her dead brother. Does this sound like a material for a shallow horror story? No way. Assayas manages to go under the surface, getting at the longings we all share these days when too concerned with materialistic needs. No doubt the psychological and philosophical aspects of this story are interesting, but what confirms his status as an original and gifted director is the way he mixes genres. With Personal Shopper Assayas gives the ghost story new life, and for this he won the Best Director Award (along with Cristian Mungiu for Graduation)at Cannes, where his film debuted last year.

Honestly, I think she's amazing. Really, I have been working with a lot of actresses, and I think she's kind of unique. Sometimes I feel as if it was happening on my own eyes, when we were shooting Clouds of Sils Maria. I always liked her. I was making this film which was centered on Juliette Binoche, but I needed this assistant part, I needed the young American girl. At that point I thought she was one of the best of her generation, and I was very happy and honored to be making this film with her. I've known Juliette for twenty years. We function in very similar ways. I love to give freedom to my actors, and she loves to use that kind of space and freedom. I think it's something that Kristen discovered when we were making the film. She saw, by watching Juliette, that there were other spaces for acting, that she could use things that are within her, elements of her own personality that she had never really been using, because she had never really been allowed to. She never had the opportunity to, and she never had the freedom to. I think that she kind of loved the idea, and she grabbed it. A lot of viewers understood her better when they saw the movie, but it applies also to me. I was watching her becoming herself, and I just happened to be the guy who opened that door for her.

But I'm not the one who had her run for fresh air into new areas and new grounds, and when we finished making the movie, it's not that I was frustrated, I was extremely happy with what she brought to the film and the energy she gave the film. But thinking about it in retrospect, I had the feeling that this film was not written for that actress, and the space she was taking was not built-in, the character was not as multilayered as the character of Juliette, nor the character of Maureen in Personal Shopper. So I left, not with a frustration, but certainly with a desire to see what would happen if I could push her a little further. The thing is that through Sils Maria she got a kind of recognition in Europe, within the European film community, but very specifically in France where it was materialized by a prize, the César award. She's this American superstar who got some kind of recognition in Europe through a small film. So, all of a sudden she's been an adopted French icon.

I remember a few years ago in Cannes you said, 'When I work with Juliette, I try to portray her in a very different way than her public image is.' Do you have the same aim with Kristen?

I think that by now people are pretty aware that Kristen can do a lot of things. It's not just her part in Sils Maria, it's Woody Allen's movie, it's a lot of different stuff she's been doing, and all of a sudden people see her for what she is. Even in retrospect, I think that for instance, for some reason the kind of artistic visibility that a movie like Sils Maria had, it's not that it created it for Kristen. It's that all of a sudden more people saw her as more complex and with more potential that what she had earlier. Now she's fulfilling that potential. I think she's only done half, or a small part, of what she has the potential to do. Now she has become a very respected actress.

Personal Shopper is a contemporary ghost story. Did you use the genre to comment on the reality around you?

To put it as simply as I can, I wanted to make a movie about the tension in modern societies between the stupid jobs a lot of people do and their spiritual longings. I think that the modern world is giving a lot of space to the material world by being such a consumer society, and with jobs that are increasingly weird, defined by new areas of the economy. We feel so much like pawns in the material world, which does not really respect our own spiritual longings, and I think we all in one way or another have to create our alternative to the material world. There is not so much religion around, so it has to be defined in other ways in terms of our relationship to art, to whatever, it's all one in the same thing. So I wanted to create a character that would embody that tension, and then it evolved into something different and expanded.

You have a very exciting job. Was it difficult for you to see the world through the other kind of eye?

I think artists are extremely privileged. They are privileged because, specifically when you are a filmmaker, you create your own world around you. Not just in terms of the movies you create, but also the way you make your movies. I'm extremely lucky in the sense that I'm making movies with the people I love, together with all my friends, and we have been working together for ages. So I have been able to create my own bubble, and that's the privilege of artists. But when you are a filmmaker also I think you end up being acquainted with a lot of dimensions of modern society. As a writer, as a director, you have to deal with all levels of society, when you visit locations and visiting where people live, you visit different countries and areas that you were initially not familiar with. So your view of society expands, and you have a very broad notion of workings of modern societies, and that's what you are trying to represent for your films.

Is it also the place you put your spirituality?

Creation has to do with spirituality. Sometimes we are taken hostage by our words, or are limited by our use of words. It's like when I'm discussing how I made a ghost story, but it's not just a ghost story; ghosts are something we all live in, in one way or another, they are our friends or family we have lost. It's part of our identity, and any relationship we have with the invisible or supernatural has to do with something that is our own subconscious. There is something that drives us that we don't completely understand. There is a dark area within ourselves, so we use a lot of different words to define the relationship we have with that darkness within ourselves, and, of course, art is the most obvious example. I started very young as a painter, as a kid, a teenager, I was painting those abstract canvases—they were not worth much, but I still remember the lesson. When you paint something abstract, ultimately when do you decide when the painting is over? You start creating something that is not exactly the shape or representation of the world; it's more a representation of some sort of emotion in your inner world. When do you end up deciding that's it, that you have represented something that you are not exactly able to verbalize? Or like, when you are writing, you don't know what you will be writing, and that applies to any form of writing. You start writing and all of a sudden the words come out of your pen. The process of any form of creation has to do with something that is not visible, it's not exactly tangible.

To tell this story you mixed different genres. Was this idea more present in this film than in others?

Yes, a bit more. I think it has always been a little bit more below the surface. It was more like an undercurrent, but it's present in all the movies I've made, in one way or another. If only because I really do think people are driven by the subconscious. And it's not just about my movies. It's the way I've been watching the movies of other filmmakers, obviously. I think that I had at the back of my mind the notion that one day I should be making that extra step, that I should make a movie where I would try to connect the conscious and the subconscious, the genre elements and everyday life, because ultimately it's my conviction that defines the human experience. We are half living in the material world and half living in our imagination, in our faults, in our own intellectual, spiritual world. I think that genre is a reductive word to express that. If you take great genre filmmakers, like David Cronenberg, like John Carpenter, like Wes Craven, they are as deep as any psychological filmmaker. I think they deal with something as deep, as profound, as real, as shared—in terms of the human experience—as anybody.

Did you have any particular film or director in mind when you planned the film?

When I make film, I try to forget about movies. I'm trying to rely on my own experience, but I suppose the territory where I'm making this film is not uncharted. I think that Ingmar Bergman, who is a filmmaker I immensely admire, has certainly the stronger example. I had this weird experience when I just finished writing Personal Shopper, and there was this Michelangelo Antonioni retrospective at the French cinema, and I went to see Blow-Up, which I hadn't seen on the big screen—and I had not even seen it on a small screen, actually, for a very long time. The movie is great, I'm a huge Antonioni fan, but it struck me, while watching Blow-Up, the similarities between what I had written and that movie. It's not literal, but you have some marginal figure of the fashion world who lives in the kind of swinging, and whose life becomes transformed. He all of a sudden has more awareness of himself through the relationship to a crime story that happened or did not happen. So I said to myself that all of a sudden ultimately this movie is explaining to me exactly what I wanted to make in the first place, and it kind of gave me the key to my own film.

In terms of working in English, how much of that is a commercial decision, and how much is creative?

It certainly is not a commercial decision because... we lost all the French privileges, we had like basically no support in France. We had no tax credit, we couldn't apply anything. So it's very much a difficult decision. But also in this film it had to do with the fact that I wanted to do the film with Kristen. She was the obvious actress for this film, and I could not imagine a French actress to play her role. So I suppose that the name of Kristen, the fact that movies have been traveling, it means that we could recoup some of what we lost, in terms of French financing, through international sales. But still, this is a small-budget film. This is a movie I end up making with a very fragile economy because, again, when you don't have access to French subsidies on one side, and on the other side you have to sell all the territories to finance the film, there is very little option of making good profit out of it. But there is the door that making a film in English opens. If I make a movie in French, then I'm kind of stuck with the small world of French filmmaking. If I make a film in English, it's not that I can use just English-speaking actors; I can use international actors who happen to speak English. Lars [Eidinger], for instance, doesn't speak French, so if I made the movie in French I wouldn't have been able to work with him.

The way I approached it is by using what mediums would see in séances, which is spiritual photography of the late nineteenth century. In the late nineteenth century the people genuinely believed in ghosts, they genuinely believed it was a new science, the exploring of the other world, and they represented it via spiritual photography, where you have apparitions of ghosts. They look very naive to us, because they are pretty crude superimpositions, but still they are kind of scary. In terms of how we reconstructed the presence of the ghost, it was both through spiritual photography and the description by mediums of what they saw during these séances.

Watching your film, I was thinking about Facebook’s accounts of people who died. Their accounts still exist, and nobody knows what to do with them.

When you discuss ghosts, it's always about what we do with our dead. We live in a society that has very little to tell us on that level. We are kind of left with questions, issues, and it's kind of deep and everyone has to confront it. Before, it was the reference world of religion. Now that's pretty much gone, and we are left unknowing with how we relate to the disappearance of someone. It's a very deep and intimate question; I think what you are saying is only one aspect of it. It's everywhere. What do we do with the dead, how do we relate to the dead? It's just like we turn out the light and it's gone? Possibly that's a reality, but that's not enough when you are mourning. You need to create your own rituals, you end up creating your own imaginary world, in terms of how you relate. I've lost my parents and lots of different friends, they are with me, and for each of them I've needed to rebuild some sort of relationship. We all do that in a way or another. And yes, I do have, in my phone book, a lot of names of departed friends.

Why do you think society does that to us?

Because, I suppose, on the one side it's the way society is changing, and it's giving us in material or abstract terms things that the imagination-world of religion was giving to us before. I think that science creates a different frame of mind and a completely different way to relate to this. I think that people have quite rightly considered that it's more important to have immediately in the material world some kind of gratification than postponing it to the afterlife. I think there are a lot of very good reasons, but at the same time, the scientific world and the material world are not the end of all things. There is a mystery in the subconscious, and it's kind of interesting if you watch it from the filmmaking point of view. For a long time psychoanalysis was one of the exciting, interesting approaches to what movies were about. Now that's gone. People don't ever use psychoanalysis anymore to discuss movies. I'm not sure why they don’t. I grew up in the seventies, the seventies had to do with spirituality and belief in ideologies. On the one side you had the hippies, who were smoking pot and thinking of Buddhist religion, and on the other side you had leftists who were militant Marxists and who were trying to change the world on Marxist terms. They were all driven by abstract ideas, abstract goals, and that's gone. Why is that gone, I have no idea. I think people have their own reasons why they want instant gratification. But still I think in the life there is something missing. It's more like possibly the seventies went too far in one direction, and now we are extremely far in the opposite.

Now we seem run by abstract ideas, too, the same as in the seventies. History seems to repeat itself.

Yes, I think things are coming back in the worst possible form. But religious extremism of any kind is not what I'm describing when I'm talking about spirituality. I think that today there is a form of extremism of religion that is terrifying because it's totalitarian in the worst sense of the word. You feel a certain comeback of totalitarian thought, which is very different to idealism. Idealism in one way or another has to do with positive values.

One says that in a way religion is always totalitarian.

Yeah, OK, so this is a complicated discussion. I think that religion is whatever you make of it. I think we all have some sort of spiritual longing, and we can find it in philosophy or religion. The way people find it in religion can be extremely respectable. But yes, the church and the dogma can be totalitarian. Again, it's a complicated discussion. I think that some sort of very beneficial and beautiful spirituality can also be found in religion. But yes, the way it is written and totalitarian religion is not what I'm thinking of.

You grew up in the seventies; I suppose you as well, at the time, believed in some abstract ideas. Have you lost them?

No, I have not. I think I remain stuck there. I still do believe in some of the radical leftist thought from that period in terms of the way I see politics. I still do believe in some sort of spirituality in the sense of what the hippies believed. I'm a half and half. I do believe that we do need some sort of relationship with the irrational, it's an essential dimension of us, but I also think at the same time the way I see the world and politics is still defined by seventies radicalism. I just can't get rid of it.

And what about cinema? Do you still believe in it with the same power you had then?

Yes, even more so. We were discussing the way cinema deals with ghosts. I think of the beauty of art and specifically cinema, it's both representing the material world—there is a documentary side of it—and at the same time it is also capturing something of the invisible in the world. I think that movies are always about something else than what they seem to be about, in some way or another. A few days ago I saw the Ken Loach film I, Daniel Blake, which has been received as some sort of epitome of social filmmaking. Yes, sure, of course, it's there—but I also see a movie of an old man scared of death. I see an old man, who is losing his grip with the world. It's a very dark film about the human condition. It's not a social film at all. It's really like the last Leonard Cohen album.