“She spent a year in Hong Kong [making In the Mood for Love]. I mean, ultimately, it wrecked our relationship,” he recounts, with a laugh, “because she spent a year in Hong Kong, and I was myself shooting a very complex, expensive period piece [Sentimental Destinies] in provincial France. And so all of a sudden, we were really on two different planets.… It was created by cinema and it was in a certain way destroyed by cinema, I guess.”
On the set of Clean, Assayas recalls: “I told…

