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Olivier Assayas, the celebrated French director of “Clouds of Sils Maria” and “Irma Vep,” is making his Berlinale competition debut this year with “Suspended Time,” his most personal film to date.

Speaking to Variety ahead of the movie’s premiere at the Berlinale, Assayas says the film retells his experience during the lockdown and is based on his personal diary.

“When I was writing this diary, I felt that despite my anxieties and doubts or fears, it was an idyllic period, to be confined in the countryside,” he says. “It was a time where we believed in a form of utopia and as soon as society got back in action, it dissolved.”

Narrated by Assayas and woven with archival material, the comedy stars Vincent Macaigne as the director’s alter-ego, Paul, a well-known filmmaker who is confined with his music journalist brother Etienne (Micha Lescot) and their girlfriends Morgane (Nine d’Urso...

The French film director on the magic of Nick Cave, his fascination with Theodor Adorno and his favourite Paris market

Writer and director Olivier Assayas was born in Paris and grew up during the aftermath of the civil unrest of 1968. Assayas directed his first film, Nuit féline, in 1978, after a varied cinematographic apprenticeship that included working as an editor for Cahiers du Cinéma and ghostwriting episodes of Maigret for his father, the director Jacques Rémy. His 17 feature films include Clean (2004), Something in the Air (2012) and Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), and cover subjects as diverse as youthful rebellion, the life of a Protestant minister, and corporate battles over anime pornography. Assayas’s latest film, Personal Shopper, starring Kristen Stewart as a fashion Pa trying to make contact with her dead twin, is out on 17 March.

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Olivier Assayas's new film is set amid the fallout of the May 68 uprising and the rebellious antics of its hero recall the director's own youthful protests. He talks about adrenaline rushes and breaking rules

Olivier Assayas, the writer, director and former film critic, is truly cool. He is the maker of some of the most playful, intellectual French cinema of the past two decades. His tastes are eclectic, his skill-set vast: he can move confidently between witty romps (such as his 1996 breakthrough, Irma Vep, one of the cleverest of all films about film-making, or the techno-thriller Demonlover) and lavish, patient period pieces (Les Destinées Sentimentales) or slow-burn emotional studies (Summer Hours). His most formidable achievement is the five-and-a-half-hour Carlos, a painstaking recreation of the rise of Carlos the Jackal made for television in 2010 but mounted with a scope and handsomeness to shame any Hollywood equivalent.

Separated from the actor Maggie Cheung,...