“You could feel this imagination, this fantasy in the film”: Olivier Assayas, Nora Hamzawi and Vincent Macgaine on Suspended Time at Berlinale 2024

Olivier Assayas, the French filmmaker responsible for acclaimed titles such as Irma Vep, as well as Netflix’s Wasp Network, was inspired to make a film about his experiences in lockdown – or at least an interpretation of these experiences. Vincent Macaigne plays a fictionalised version of Assayas, managing hypochondria as he weathers the pandemic with his brother and their partners.

It’s a light (and occasionally too light) movie that presents a wistful depiction of those months when the world was shrunk to a person’s own home and the other people who might share it. The feature is a very personal one for this director, not just because the lead character is a version of himself, but more because it was shot in the director’s childhood home.

According to Assayas, he wasn’t even sure Hors du temps would become a film when he started writing it. “Let’s say the circumstances were particular ones because I wrote it at the end of the first lockdown, and I didn’t write it like a script or a screenplay, because I wasn’t sure at the beginning that it would be a film,” the director said. “I started writing – it was more like sketches that I was making during this period of the lockdown, and I tried to be as realistic as possible in my writing. How can I put it? I wanted to write down the emotions that I had during this period of time because I lived in this house, and I was a child back then in the house. I was surprised by the way when I came back to this house and gradually I wrote down the scenes, which represented what I experienced back in my childhood. It was about my relationship with my brother as well.”

Unsurprisingly, a movie with a title like Suspended Time deals with the notion of time and memories, and the script caused actress Nora Hamzawi to do a little reminiscing of her own. “I’ve got the feeling that when talking about the past, I don’t know, maybe this is because when you turn 40, or when you become a mother, then you start talking about the past, about when you were a teenager for instance,” said Hamzawi. “I also talked a lot about myself – what it was like in the old days; and I thought, and I still think, that the world has changed significantly. We thought a lot about the past because there were these conditions of the lockdown, and they were completely different depending on where you were.”

Filming in Assayas’ childhood home was a surreal experience for actress Nine D’Urso. “It wasn’t only fiction, and it wasn’t 100% reality – what you could see in the film, but I think when writing the script it was also a particular situation when we were doing the film with Olivier, we were surrounded by the objects that were touched, or had been touched, by the real people at the time.” The actress continued, “So these were the circumstances, and I think you have to try to show this kind of dance between the objects which had already existed – and they had this power, stronger than us, and we had to try to find our space in this environment of objects. So, a very delicate situation.”

As for playing a fictional version of the director who’s directing him, Vincent Macgaine took it all in his stride. “It’s neither a perk nor a challenge. The scripts by Olivier are always very well-written, and I’m being carried by this; I’m helped by this script, like all of us I believe, so it was rather straightforward. You could feel this imagination, this fantasy in the film.”

Hors du temps marks the third collaboration between Macaigne and Assayas, and the actor was full of praise for his director. “I think that the film is very beautiful, because as a matter of fact, it’s very intimate. At the same time, there’s a lot of derision – a sense of humour for one’s self shown by Olivier. There’s a certain type of distance to the reality though, and as a matter of fact, I got inspiration from Olivier of course, and Olivier is the director directing me of course, and it’s also about one’s imagination, and I always have the impression that I can put some derision or some fantasy, some imagination into the character.”

For Assayas, the biggest challenge of the project was returning to the metaphorical ghosts of his own past. “Before doing the film I was a little bit afraid of ghosts, because it’s not my house; neither is it the house of my brother. It’s the house of my father and mother. They lived there, their spirits can be felt there, and well – it’s true. I was watching a film and I was watching my surroundings, and I take a look at it in a different way than other people because if I see the objects, I can feel  and I remember my father and mother,” said the director. “It is a comedy, but still, it’s a comedy for everybody I believe. Basically speaking it’s also about mourning, so this is something which is closely linked to mourning – more so than anything else. Well, the question is rather whether I’m at peace with this mourning. Maybe. I don’t know. I think it’s important that time passes, and then when I go into this house I can feel it differently. Maybe I have to see if this is the case.”

Oliver Johnston
Image: Alexander Janetzko

Suspended Time does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Berlin Film Festival 2024 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Berlin Film Festival website here.

Watch a clip from Suspended Time here: