Olivier Assayas is almost done with a new screenplay that would extend Something in the Air into the 1970s and sit after his other planned projects
The French director Olivier Assayas has revealed that he is close to completing a screenplay for a sequel to his 2012 film Something in the Air. In a conversation with Nick Newman for the Metrograph Journal, Assayas described the project as a continuation of material he has mined in both his films and his book A Post-May Adolescence. The original feature traced a young man’s involvement with political movements around May ’68 and suggested, by its end, a turn toward filmmaking as a life path.
Rather than a franchise in the conventional sense, this prospective follow-up would function as part of a personal cinematic sequence: a director revisiting decades of cultural shifts and personal development. Assayas’s work often mixes fiction with autobiography, and this project would extend that blend by focusing on the next era after the events dramatized in 2012. He has characterized the new film as dealing with what he calls the punk rock years, a period that shaped both society and his artistic outlook.
According to Assayas, the sequel intends to dramatize the late 1970s, when punk and other cultural upheavals reshaped attitudes that had been fixed earlier in the decade. For the director, that era was less about nostalgia and more about a release from suffocating political dogma. In past comments he made it clear that the arrival of punk felt like a necessary liberation—an abrupt clearing of the air after years of ideological rigidity. The new screenplay is reported to probe that shift, exploring how young people rethought identity, art, and politics at the end of the 1970s.
Assayas’s memoir and earlier films already map out a personal timeline he seems willing to keep returning to. The proposed sequel would complement his earlier narrative by tracing the same protagonist into a decade of experimentation and disillusionment transformed into creative energy. The film would therefore act as a bridge between political coming-of-age and a subsequent cultural awakening, an approach the director has used before when converting memory and autobiography into dramatic material.
One practical issue Assayas acknowledged is the passage of time. Because the new story is set in the 1970s—only a few years after the events of his 2012 film in narrative terms—it would be awkward to restore the original cast nearly two decades later without rethinking how characters are portrayed. That temporal proximity complicates decisions about whether to recast, age characters artificially, or reinterpret roles through different performers. Fans who remember actors from the first film will recognize the difficulty of preserving continuity while remaining faithful to historical pacing.
Beyond casting, the director must decide how literal the sequel will be. Will it present a faithful chronological continuation, or will it rely on the more oblique, fragmentary methods Assayas has used when blending memoir with fiction? Those creative choices affect tone, performance, and the degree to which the film functions as a standalone work rather than a direct sequel in the traditional cinematic sense.
Assayas emphasized that even though the screenplay is nearly finished, this film will not immediately follow his next release. He told Newman that if he makes the sequel, it “won’t be my next film, it will be the one after,” indicating a deliberate sequencing of projects. At the same time, the director remains engaged with recent work such as Suspended Time, which itself explored the strange moment of 2026. That film’s meta qualities and autobiographical impulses suggest Assayas is thinking about a broader cycle in which each project reflects back on the others.
One playful possibility he has floated—part speculation, part wishful thinking—would have actor-director Vincent Macaigne reprise a version of the director’s stand-in from Suspended Time and then direct another stand-in in a reimagining of the already self-referential Irma Vep series. Such nesting of stand-ins and remakes hints at how Assayas’s films sometimes fold into one another, creating a web of mirrored identities and cinematic callbacks.
For observers of contemporary French cinema, a sequel like Something in the Air 2 represents more than a back-catalog revival: it underlines Assayas’s ongoing interest in how historical moments alter artistic trajectories. Whether the film arrives soon or later, it promises to continue the director’s exploration of the intersections between personal memory, political change, and cultural reinvention. For now, audiences can watch for further announcements and expect the project to emerge only after Assayas completes other commitments.
Until then, the idea of returning to the late 1970s through Assayas’s voice remains an intriguing prospect: a director willing to map his life and era across multiple films, shaping a sequence that reads as a cinematic memoir rather than a commercial franchise.