Kristen Stewart film ‘Personal Shopper’ made during Paris terror attacks

Cannes audiences got squirrely when French filmmaker Olivier Assayas unveiled his new film “Personal Shopper” last May. Some critics even took to loudly booing the modern-day ghost story starring one of the world’s biggest movie stars.

But Mr. Assayas, a Parisian, is quick to laugh off the incident, which he chalks up to the typically hoity-toity Cannes festival being perhaps uncomfortable with a “genre” picture.

“When you go to Cannes with a movie that has genre elements, you’re asking for trouble,” Mr. Assayas told The Washington Times, adding that he had a similar experience bringing his earlier film “Demonlover” to the film fest. “People react because they care,” he said. “There is this kind of excitement in Cannes that borders on hysterics at times.”

Despite the hissing of some critics, Mr. Assayas was nominated for the festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or prize. He is now betting that the spooky film, with “Twilight” series stalwart Kristen Stewart in the main role, will grab audiences when it opens in the District this weekend.

Mr. Assayas re-teams with Miss Stewart for “Personal Shopper,” who starred for him in the 2014 drama “Clouds of Sils Maria.” Miss Stewart stars in the new film as Maureen, an American living in France who works by motoring around Paris shopping for a celebrity client, but at night attempts to make contact with her deceased twin brother. Things don’t go precisely as she’d planned, and Maureen begins receiving a series of increasingly disturbing text messages from someone — or something — that may have evil intentions.

In addition to the supernatural elements of “Personal Shopper,” Mr. Assayas said the employment and fulfillment struggles Maureen faces are universal frustrations.

“I think we all are torn between our job and our dreams, our inner worlds,” he said. “All of us live in two worlds — one where we have to make a living and do stuff we don’t necessarily identify with … and we have an inner life which ends up somehow being the better part of us.”

It is this duality of experience that defines Maureen at the outset of the story, before she takes the dark turn into seances with entities from the great beyond.

Mr. Assayas and his crew were in production in November 2015 when the terrorist attacks at the Bataclan theater and a soccer match in Paris left over 125 people dead. The film crew was at that time in the Czech Republic to shoot on interior sets, and Mr. Assayas recalls vividly awakening that morning to frantic messages from friends and relatives.

With the extent of the carnage still unknown, Mr. Assayas, employing many fellow French craftsmen, faced the dilemma of stopping work for the day — the film had a rather brisk production schedule — or pushing on in the grand tradition of showbiz.

“Very early I realized that the right decision was to do things at planned,” he said, with the cast and crew pressing on despite trying to determine if anyone they knew had been killed.

“We had this sense [of being] detached from where it was happening,” Mr. Assayas said, adding that there was also a strange sense of comfort being away from Paris at that precise moment. “But at the same time, we were incredibly connected.”

Flash-forward to the following year, and “Personal Shopper” premiered rather close to the Bataclan theater, the site of one of the massacres.

With the film complete — and its unfortunate history astern — Mr. Assayas hopes that cinema audiences will warm to its message of staying true to one’s hopes and dreams and the need to take stock of what is truly important in life.

“We live in the most absurdly materialistic society. I’m enjoying it, but at the same time, I fear we have to be in touch with what’s happening inside us,” he said, “and that’s sometimes mysterious. We should not be scared of the mysteries within us.”

And while, yes, there is a supernatural element to “Personal Shopper,” the director believes that it’s far more than just that.

“It became must more than I had imagined,” Mr. Assayas said of his film. It became, he said, “a story about love.”