In a three-decade career that has ranged from an autobiographical reverie of youthful rebellion (Cold Water) to a delirious neo-noir (Demonlover) to a historical crime saga (Carlos), French filmmaker Olivier Assayas has channeled his gift for crafting intimate character studies through an impressive array of genres. His delight in juggling various styles, which reflects the period he spent in his mid-to-late twenties exploring his cinephilic obsessions as a critic at Cahiers du cinéma, extends to his Cannes award–winning latest feature, Personal Shopper, a supernatural thriller that tells the story of a young American fashion assistant in Paris who seeks to get in touch with the afterlife after the passing of her twin brother. Starring Kristen Stewart, whose performance in Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria made her the first American actor to win a César Award, this melancholy portrait of loss combines the director’s psychological acuity with the spooky chills of a ghost story.

With Personal Shopper now in theaters, we’re sharing a conversation we had with Assayas during his visit to the Criterion office last October, shortly before the film’s premiere at the New York Film Festival.

Seeing Personal Shopper and Irma Vep (1994) in close succession at the Toronto Film Festival made me curious about how conscious you are of your past work when creating something new. I’m really interested in this dialogue between my movies. It’s important for me to have a notion of how my movies echo one another. I’ve been lucky to write all my films and more or less make movies with the same freedom of a novelist writing his novels. Every single movie I’ve made is like a part of this one movie, which includes the present, the past, the future—mapping the world in its own way. What excites me when I’m making a film is that it covers ground I have not covered before. It’s part of the same energy, but I’ve moved the stage somewhere else.