Giving Up the Ghost

French auteur Olivier Assayas on Personal Shopper, his Parisian supernatural shocker…

When is a ghost story not a conventional genre movie? Maybe when it’s Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper. Set in Paris, Kristen Stewart’s Maureen speeds around the city collecting designer outfits for her starlet boss Kyra. But in her spare time? A part-time medium still suffering from the death of her twin brother, she haunts old buildings waiting for a sign from her sibling.

“This film is a character study,” says Assayas, who started the project after his Chicago crime thriller Idol’s Eye collapsed one day before shooting. Yet the director admits “genre is key” when it came to creating specific textures relating to Maureen, “to her anxieties, to her fears, to her loneliness or the violence of whatever she’s going through.”