Olivier Assayas and Alicia Vikander on their self-aware showbiz satire Irma Vep

In 1996, the French film-maker Olivier Assayas made a film about a French film-maker remaking the 1915 silent film serial Les Vampires. Now, 26 years later, Assayas has remade his film about a remake as a film serial for HBO. The word meta doesn’t begin to do justice to the millefeuille-like layers of this puzzle. Hyper-meta? Meta-meta? Let’s just call it Irma Vep — and take a moment to solve the anagram of that title.

The new story is made up of new elements and ones recycled from the previous incarnation and Assayas’s own life. In doing so, it neatly satirises Hollywood’s habit of endlessly returning to past glories but also wrestles sincerely with the “deep and complex crisis” facing filmmakers today — the lure of making content for cash-rich streaming services while still being attached to the ideal of big-screen cinema.

“When I made Irma Vep ’96, I was reflecting on the relationship between modern cinema and the grace and beauty of silent films. Now there’s another layer in the middle,” says Assayas when we meet at a beachside bar during the Cannes Film Festival. “Time has passed, I’m a different person and cinema has changed as much as the world has. There was hardly any internet then, now it is revolutionising filmmaking.” 

Slight and greying but still with a boyish quality that belies his 67 years, Assayas speaks in rapid, animated bursts with analytical insights that reflect his origins as a critic for Cahiers du Cinema. There has remained in him something of the outsider looking in — it was there in the original Irma Vep, in which Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung cast a quizzical eye over the messy, bohemian business of 1990s French filmmaking, and more recently in searching films such as Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper and Non-Fiction. The new series too is full of probing and often very funny observations on the current state of the screen industries — and on Assayas himself, who is thinly disguised as angst-ridden director René Vidal (deliriously played by Vincent Macaigne).

“When I started writing the screenplay, I realised that if I want to reminisce about Irma Vep ’96 I have to deal with my personal life because I was married to the actress [Cheung]. And I thought ‘Oh my god, this movie is going to be not just about reviving the film but about my marriage and divorce.’”

Cheung, who was married to Assayas from 1998 to 2001 and gave the new script her blessing, turns up in the new series as Jade Lee, played by Vivian Wu. Irma meanwhile is played by Mira (yes, another anagram — keep up at the back), star of a blockbuster franchise, who is escaping Hollywood to make a quirky European serial. She is played by Alicia Vikander, Swedish star of Tomb Raider and an Oscar-winner for The Danish Girl.

Vikander, speaking separately in Cannes, is at pains to point out the differences between her and Mira beyond the surface similarities. “She doesn’t seem fulfilled,” she says as if contemplating an unhappier version of herself. “I don’t do films because I need to do them, I do them because I want to do them. Something like Tomb Raider I loved doing.”

While Cheung was wide-eyed at her new milieu, Mira is jaded by fame, her cool exterior sometimes cracking as she boils over in frustration. “That’s my own interpretation of her,” says Vikander, 33. “I like Mira but she is a bit of a bitch sometimes. I can see what she’s going through and I let her go a few times.”

I say that Mira appears to have many faces. She is confident and resolute in her professional life, uncertain and vulnerable in her personal life and is transformed when she slips into a velvet catsuit to play the master criminal Vep. “That’s why I like playing her,” Vikander says. “One doesn’t take the other part away. And if you removed one part then the other part wouldn’t be the same. It’s only when you know somebody that you reflect on how they behave in different situations and they become interesting.”

Applauding the increasing prevalence of complexity in roles written for women, she checks herself. “Maybe I shouldn’t have used the word ‘bitch’ just now. I want women to be able to have all sides make them real — not just the happy, pretty, cute girlfriend.” 

One of the most striking differences between Irma Vep ’96 and ’22 is the origin of the actress in the lead role. I ask Assayas why he did not cast a Chinese actress this time. “Maggie was an ‘alien’ from Asia; Alicia is an alien from Hollywood. [Mira] is like a refugee looking for political refugee status. It’s funnier and says more about the situation now.” 

“Then and now” is something that clearly preoccupied Assayas while writing, and it’s a theme that comes up repeatedly in our conversation. “When I made the original, it was the end of something,” he says. “There was a sense that we were making the last nouvelle vague-inspired movies and so there was a crisis there but it was nothing as deep or as complex as the crisis we are going through now. Now we are questioning the very notion of cinema.”

For Assayas, the answer does not lie in blockbusters, even if they do lure audiences back into cinemas. “Mainstream Hollywood is getting worse and worse,” he says. “I’m a very basic film fan. I can watch a lot of junk and have a lot of fun. But I’m not having fun any more, I’m getting bored.”

But nor does he see streaming platforms as the saviours of movies. This becomes evident in one episode of Irma Vep when the cast and crew engage in a heated debate on the merits of streaming series: “They are not long movies, they are ‘content’,” scoffs the louche German actor Gottfried (marvellously played by Lars Eidinger). “They are industrial entertainment ruled by algorithm.”

Assayas shares the view, noting with dismay his 12-year-old daughter’s Netflix viewing history — “depressing”. But what of the critically lauded films the company has backed, such as Roma?

“I’ve always been convinced that they are making those movies so they can have some kind of prestige product, so that the parents will subscribe,” he says. “But in the end the kids will be watching . . . ” He searches for a suitable example.

“Reruns of Friends?” I offer.

“Yes. And I think there will be an end to that because it’s a matter of status. Now they have the status they will not need to spend the kind of money they spent on The Irishman or Roma. Which just created confusion because Roma makes no sense at all on the small screen. No sense at all. [Both films had only a brief run at a small number of cinemas.] I love the film, I love [director] Alfonso Cuarón, but I think he sold his soul to the devil, he sold his movie to the devil in a certain way.” 

The apparent contradiction here is glaring. Why, if Assayas is so attached to the big screen, has he made this new Irma Vep for HBO? The paradox is not lost on Assayas — in fact he mocks his proxy René Vidal in the series for insisting that his new work is not a series but “a movie divided into eight pieces”. The difference, as far as I can tell, is that Irma Vep was made with the small screen in mind. Plus, there was a more pragmatic reason: he explains that it would have been impossible to raise the money for such an ambitious project in France today, while US backers A24 and HBO “greeted me with open arms”.

And yet, despite all of this, there is a part of him that is drawn to the cinema experience. “I’m really happy because on HBO it will be shown to more people than any of my movies ever or something like that. But at the same time, whatever I’ve done, whatever it’s called, I know it looks better on the big screen.” 

Somewhat gingerly, I point out that Cannes might be the only place Irma Vep will ever be shown in a film theatre. “Hopefully some festival will be generous enough to show the full version,” he says, sounding like an indie debutant touting his first short.

All of which leads us to another puzzle. If cinema is not necessarily what is shown in cinemas, what is it? Assayas admits he doesn’t have all the answers to this existential quandary but he is at least asking the questions.

“I’ve been trying to define what exactly movies are, where the line is, and I think it has to do with freedom,” he says. “If you have freedom, I think you can call it cinema. If you don’t and you have to adapt to some kind of conventional, industrial form of narrative, it’s not cinema.”

On HBO Max in the US now and on Sky in the UK from August 2