Most shows fall into recognizable categories: original stories, spin-offs, docudramas or, increasingly, reboots and revivals.
Then there is ‘Irma Vep’. Olivier Assayas’ new HBO series, starring Alicia Vikander, is more of a braid in which the past and present are inextricably intertwined. Its origins go back more than a century, although it is more useful to start our story in 1996, when a movie of the same title came out.
At the time, Assayas was a former critic-turned-filmmaker with a handful of intimate arthouse dramas to his credit. “Irma Vep” brought him international fame.
Not because it was a commercial hit, mind you. The film “didn’t really impress at the box office,” the French writer-director said in a video call from his Paris office last month. “It didn’t do that great.”
What “Irma Vep” had in spades was cool though.
This was partly due to the meta topic. Real-life Hong Kong action star Maggie Cheung – whom Assayas married a few years later – played a version of herself while shooting a remake of “Les Vampires” (1915-16), a French silent film series, by Louis Feuillade, about a disguised criminal named Irma Vep.
And then there was Assayas’ fingers-in-socket style, which produced such memorable scenes as Cheung fidgeting anxiously in a black latex catsuit while Sonic Youth rained electricity on the soundtrack.
“I think it’s a film that a lot of people hold dear, especially because it’s about cinema,” Ravi Nandan, the head of TV at A24, the production company behind the series, said on the phone from Los Angeles. “So people in filmmaking, both Hollywood and independent cinema, have seen it all and loved it.”
“It’s kind of a touchstone in that Truffaut, ‘Day for Night’ way,” he added.
The series, which premieres Monday on HBO, isn’t a sequel split into eight episodes; Assayas chooses a literary analogy when trying to explain the nature of the project. “Making ‘Irma Vep’ the new ‘Irma Vep’ is like going from poetry to novel — and to a thick novel,” he said. (While the show works on its own, the matryoshka doll structure is more rewarding if you’ve seen the movie, which is currently streaming on HBO Max and the Criterion Channel.)
That this wasn’t a repeat was one of the reasons Vikander signed up. “He said, ‘No, no, it’s just a continuation of it – I’m not done with it, that’s why I’m interested in doing it,'” she said in a video chat from London, recalling Assayas’ pitch. “I could see he had that little fire in him.”
Another reason was their friendship: The pair met when he thought he had to rearrange his 2016 movie “Personal Shopper” because the intended lead actor, Kristen Stewart, was having a scheduling conflict. In the end, Stewart was able to free himself and make that film, but Assayas and Vikander kept in touch. As the series took shape, the Swedish actress was her first choice for the lead character of Mira, a Hollywood star who goes to Paris to remake an old silent film series about — well, you’ve heard this one before.
“I felt like she hadn’t unleashed her full potential,” Assayas said of Vikander. “I thought she was funny, she’s smart, she’s fast, she has a deep understanding and love for movies. I felt that the combination of the two of us, something could happen.”
Vikander, who first attracted major attention for playing an android in “Ex Machina” and won an Academy Award for the historical drama “The Danish Girl” (2015), isn’t widely known for his light-hearted material. So the comedic dimension of “Irma Vep” was part of the attraction.
“I longed to do that,” she said, laughing with delight. “And I think Olivier knew that by knowing me, my private person. He said, “Yeah, you need to get that out more.” I think this is just the beginning.”
In the show, the humor usually bubbles up in tandem with the antics of the French cast and crew that Mira works with, led by the mercurial René Vidal (Vincent Macaigne), a neurotic, cinema-obsessed director who has already made a film about Irma. Vep (starring a Chinese actress named “Jade Lee” as a stand-in for Cheung) and is now back with a series. Funnily enough, Macaigne’s speaking cadence often sounds like Assayas’s, and while the director agrees he partially wrote himself in René, he said he’s nicer.
“I don’t yell at people, you know,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t attack my actors.”
Still, it’s clear that parallels between art and life are woven into the fabric of the new show. And each iteration of “Irma Vep” brings with it additional, increasingly complex ripples of self-reference. “I’m part of the story of the Irma Vep character in that it starts with Louis Feuillade in 1916, and it travels through cinema to the present,” Assayas said.
“I like the idea of mixing time layers in the film, which is something you don’t get to do very often,” he continued. “And there’s the relationship with my own work, how it ages, how I relate to myself a quarter of a century apart, how the events surrounding the film – which, to be transparent, is my marriage to Maggie Cheung – is also something that echoes very deeply and essentially with the ins and outs of the series. And how modern cinema also enters into a dialogue with silent film.”
As for Mira, many viewers might assume she’s a Stewart stand-in – we see Mira arriving in Paris for the first time wearing sunglasses and a slouchy beanie, nurturing a broken heart after being dumped by her friend. It is a resemblance to Assayas both soft-pedals and does not disprove.
“There’s a little bit of it, but not really,” he said. “This was written with Alicia in mind, but then you can’t help but notice that my experience with an American movie star is Kristen Stewart. I don’t know many of them, and she’s a friend, and I love her and I admire her. So yeah, there must be elements of Kristen – Kristen haunts the movie.”
As for Vikander, her identification with her character also had limits. “Probably one of the things about Mira that I can most identify with is her passionate love for cinema,” she said. “But it was also nice to do it with a character that is very different from me.”
But the new “Irma Vep” is more than a series à clef, or a patchwork of references to other stars and other films. Beneath his playful demeanor and some very funny side plots – one in particular, the need to buy crack cocaine for a confused actor – Assayas continues to explore what was at the heart of the 1996 film.
“The series is about the thin line between reality and fantasy; it’s about how we all live in a material world and an immaterial world at the same time,” he said. “When you direct, when you act, in a way you are playing a dangerous game with your identity – you are yourself and you are someone else, and you struggle to get as much truth out as you can.”
For Mira, a passageway between her ordinary life and the land of fantasy is Irma Vep’s catsuit, here made not of latex but of a silky fabric that looks closer to the serial version. As with the fictional Cheung in 1996, the costume links Mira to Irma. (You must have noticed by now that their names are an anagram, which is yet another reference to the source material.)
It’s no surprise to learn that the catsuit spell also worked on the star of the series. “You’re extremely visible because it’s so tight, but I also feel like a ninja — I just disappear,” Vikander said. “When I was in this very black thing, I really immersed myself and really enjoyed doing it. It felt like the physicality of the part.
“It was one of those things I’d thought a lot about, but when I first tried the costume,” she continued, snapping her fingers, “she just popped out.”
