Olivier speaks

Our man in Hong Kong

What a nicely odd couple they made at last fall's Thessaloniki film festival: Maggie Cheung, the womanly, dignified, ethereally beautiful Hong Kong actress, and Olivier Assayas, her chirpy, boyish French film director, he bouncing about in jeans and cheap tennis shoes. Together, they collaborated on the dandy Irma Vep, the most invigorating peek at the behind-the-scenes of moviemaking in decades. A Day for Night for the late 1990s.

"The film grew spontaneously," Assayas told me, starting with his vague wish to build a film around Cheung. He loved her from afar in Hong Kong cinema, both action films and artsy ones. "What would Maggie do in my movie? Maybe she'd be a rich Chinese woman coming to Paris to have a love affair? I had no idea it could be about filmmaking."

He traveled to Hong Kong seeking a Chinese-actress lead, though giving up on Cheung. She hadn't made a film in several years, and people told him, "She doesn't want to act any more, or she wants so much money." But the Australian cameraman Chris Doyle, director of photography on some of Cheung's best films, said, "Maggie is a very nice person. I can talk to her."

Assayas recalled, "Chris arranged our meeting in a weird way. He told Maggie, `A Frenchman really wants to meet you at midnight in a loud café.' He didn't say I was a movie director." Cheung showed up, Assayas offered her a kind of draft of a script, and the actress said, "Let's do it."

"She'd never made a film in English," Assayas said, "outside of Chinese culture, where she's a superstar. But it was the right project at the right time, and a few weeks in Paris were all right with her. And I could have a chance to make an ultra-cheap movie with a real live movie star."

The mirror-like story of Irma Vep: Cheung plays herself, Maggie Cheung, arrived in Paris to appear as the titular Irma in a remake of Feuillade's 1915-'16 serial, Les vampires. Cheung's polite, modest demeanor is a stark contrast to those wheeling around her: the back-of-the-camera crew are frenetic, and the director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is swerving toward a nervous breakdown.

Cheung befriends a lesbian costumer, Zoe (Nathalie Richard), who takes her to a dinner party hosted by Mireille (Bulle Ogier). Cheung's one break with normality comes when she dons a latex catwoman outfit, slithers into the shadows of a hotel, and steals jewelry from a nude lady talking on the telephone. A night of feline surrealism.

"Irma Vep was shot in only four weeks, and every day I reconsidered every scene," Assayas said. "I didn't want the film to be blocked. I wanted it to grow out of itself. For the dinner scene, I didn't know until the day before who would be there, and how they would be sitting. Would it be eight people? Twelve? A party? And I didn't know we'd finish with the Luna song `Bonnie and Clyde,' though it's a happy solution, an American band singing in French."

Never before Irma Vep had Cheung been asked to improvise before the camera. "She was surprised by me wanting her to act spontaneously, telling her that, if you like, you can stand here, or you can stand there. Also, change what you feel like changing. She had to deal with every kind of French actor she encountered: for example, Natalie, who is good at improvising, Bulle, who can be strange, who has problems remembering her lines, who can be wrong 10 times, then one time really brilliant.

"Maggie had to deal with being scared, feeling she could fuck up, say the wrong thing, sound stupid. After a time, she actually enjoyed it all."

Assayas came to Hong Kong cinema as a film critic in the early 1980s for the Paris-based magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. "By the time of our special Hong Kong issue, I felt that we were late, really. We were arriving as the great era of classic martial-arts cinema was finished, replaced by special effects and cheap comedy. The Golden Age of Swordplay was the 1970s to 1982, and Swordsman director King Hu was, if you want to be basic, the Orson Welles of Hong Kong cinema who had learned from Kurosawa. But the studios had fallen apart, and all the great directors were done. King Hu never completed his Touch of Zen. It was declared a flop, and he was blacklisted."

In 1984, Assayas essayed the first book in French on Hong Kong cinema. "It's not analytic, more a dictionary attempt to map out an introduction to Hong Kong filmmaking. I tried to sum up the careers of people who were basically finished, and also to deal with Hong Kong's very interesting so-called `New Wave' -- John Woo, Ann Hui, Tsui Hark." He also introduced filmmaker discoveries: "Liu Chia-Liang, a great director nobody knows, and Alan Foy, a neo-realist closer to Western tradition."

Maggie Cheung, for Assayas, is a bridge between the old and the best of the new. "She's a classic beauty who could have been in the silents. She has a special grace. But when you speak with her, she's sharp, straightforward, with a very special kind of modernity. I'd never experienced this kind of aura. It's a magic thing."