"I wrote about many things, but when I started writing, one of the new things that I brought to Cahiers was my interest in what was exciting at that time in American cinema, meaning: horror movies. It was the time of the early films of people like David Cronenberg, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter, who are very interesting filmmakers. For Cahiers it was a revolution to write that David Cronenberg was an interesting filmmaker, or that Clint Eastwood was an interesting filmmaker. Before that, Cahiers wouldn’t touch them with a 10-foot pole. For the readers and also the older writers, it was a shock to see writing that said Honkytonk Man was a good film. I was also interested in Manoel de Oliveira whose work we were discovering at that time, and I also did a lot of simple movie journalism. It was an opportunity of opening Cahiers to the world. I was involved in doing the special issue of Cahiers on American cinema called “Made in the U.S.A.” that we published in 1982. Daney was involved, and a couple of other writers, but I was the one who was central in pulling together the whole thing. So we stayed for a few weeks in L.A.—it was a very weird time: Hollywood post-Star Wars. It was one of the worst periods in American cinema. In 1984 we went to Hong King and made the special issue on Hong Kong cinema. It was the first issue dealing with this cinema—not only its present, but also its roots. It’s still in print, people do buy it once in a while. It was the first serious Western work on popular Cantonese cinema and it was like discovering a new continent. We had no notion of who were the directors, what were the films, what were the classics…it was like discovering something completely new, which is very rare in cinema."

Olivier Assayas, aqui