Of Their Age: Olivier Assayas on the Making of Cold Water

Chantal Poupaud initiated it, and I’d known her because she was doing a lot of PR for indie movies. She approached me pretty early on with this idea of having a few filmmakers make movies about their teenage years, using the music they had listened to at that time. Because I had been making movies that had some kind of musical background, some kind of rock-and-roll texture, I was one of the first filmmakers she contacted. I think Jean-Claude Brisseau and Benoît Jacquot were also involved. But then it did not happen, and time went by.

Once in a while I’d get a message from Chantal asking, “Are you still in?” It must have been in the works for a couple years, and finally she called to tell me she had found a producer. He happened to be Georges Benayoun, from IMA Films, and they had convinced ARTE, the French-German cultural channel, to finance it. The idea was to do a fifty-minute TV movie on a very small budget. Maybe if it had happened earlier, I would not have been onboard because I would have been very busy with other projects. I’d just made a movie called A New Life, which was a total disaster. I’m happy with the film, but the shoot was plagued by conflicts with the producer, who disagreed with the approach of my cut. The whole thing was a nightmare, so I thought it was a good time to try something else, something new.

I wanted to make a feature. I didn’t want to make a fifty-minute TV movie; I was not interested in shooting something autobiographical and just having it be something that’s aired on television once. I needed to make something that was a bit more lasting. So I told Chantal and Georges that I was going to make—with whatever small budget they were giving me—a ninety-minute semi-experimental film. And everything fell into place. I started shooting right after the opening of A New Life, and I needed that freedom. The sense of lightness that 16 mm gives you—for me, that was something completely different. I’ve always made very personal films, but this was straightforward autobiography, even if it was fictionalized.

I had no idea you could make a feature in four weeks. But we shot Cold Water in that amount of time. I thought: okay, I’m going to make a feature that will be a separate project within the shooting of Cold Water, but it would have the same kind of experimental texture of the movies that Philippe Garrel made in the seventies or Andy Warhol made in the sixties. Beyond making a movie about the seventies, I wanted to embed the notion of a kind of film that would have been made in the seventies. The thing that is strange for me about Cold Water is that this movie was shot in the mid-nineties, but when I looked at the film again while doing the restoration, it felt like the seventies. Instead of being a retro re-creation of the seventies, it deals with something that’s at the core of those years. It’s a movie I could have made as a teenager if I was making movies at that point.

Initially, the rule was that I did not want to use anybody who had seen a camera. I wanted to start from scratch. A lot of the prep for the film was spent casting, which went on for months. I didn’t know Virginie Ledoyen at that time, but she was the actress I had the most trouble casting. I was concerned that she was too good-looking for the part. Also, she had had a career as a child actress. But the minute I met her I sensed that she was exceptional, that she was a unique actress. She was not part of the “Dogme” rules of the project, so it took me a while to accept that I was going to use her. But the second I made up my mind I was comfortable with the decision, and when we started shooting, I realized she was absolutely Christine, and she would transcend the part. Cyprien Fouquet was in many ways closer to my initial view [of his character]. He was this sort of Bressonian actor; he was very pure and had an interiority and intensity. I often think back to Cyprien as a perfect representation of the person I was at that time, and I feel very lucky to have found him.

Cold Water was a turning point. I’ve always had a hard time with scoring movies. It’s something I did on my first and second features, and I was not so happy with the results. I did it on my third feature, Paris Awakens, and though the music was by John Cale and considerably better than the music on my previous films, I was still not happy with the way music connected with emotions and within the images. The movie I made right after that, A New Life, had no music at all. So Cold Water was a way of going back and building a new relationship with music.

What was fascinating about it was that, for the first time, I was using only music that I loved. The way I approached that very long party scene was by structuring it with music, with tracks that would cover the specific emotions and the way they change during the night. Ultimately, the songs ended up becoming one with the narrative—they say something that’s beyond the story. I think that people who have experienced the seventies are connected by that music, so all of a sudden it’s a universal language.

In many ways, the soundtrack to Something in the Air is much closer to the kind of music I loved at that time. I was very much into British underground. But the way I approached Cold Water was a little different. It doesn’t have the music I was actually listening to; it’s the music kids at that time were listening to. Then there were things I was not even aware of, like the first single by Roxy Music, “Virginia Plain.” Within the context of the film I realized that there is something extremely modern in the track, and that it was a harbinger of what would happen with punk rock. I also used songs by Leonard Cohen and Donovan that were from mature albums, not carried by the energy of their early days. These albums had the melancholy texture of artists who were producing beautiful music but were not that much a part of the zeitgeist. There was already something about the late sixties and early seventies that was fading, and those songs were about the fading.

It’s like a second first film in many ways, but it’s also strangely a prequel to my first film, Disorder. The characters in that film were the closest I’d ever gotten to autobiography, and they are ultimately the characters of Cold Water [as they would be] a few years later.

Listen to a Spotify playlist of the songs featured in the film here.