Gaspar Noé is one of the world’s most divisive, loathed and admired directors, this month releasing his third feature-length film, Enter The Void, on the international market. It is loosely based on the Tibetan Book Of The Dead, and deals with the “trip” experienced by a young man in Tokyo after his own death, a sort of ghost-POV journey fashioned using ground-breaking cinematography and which, I can assure you, is like nothing you’ve ever seen before in the cinema. Noé is perhaps best known for his 2002 feature, Irreversible, a rape-revenge story told in reverse, which features scenes of brutal violence, both physical and sexual, and which divided audiences worldwide under banners marked “Genius” and “Pervert”.
After he seems to guess my surname when I introduce myself (apparently his PR lady informed him in advance, but he observes that “there are too many Murphys in Ireland”), we get to discussing more important matters.
Maybe we can talk about your new film, Enter The Void, which I saw at the Jameson Film Festival earlier this year.
It’s been released in Ireland?
The theatrical cut is being released next month, I think, I saw the festival cut –
In the UK, it’s the end of September. Actually, I was in Ireland to show my first film, I Stand Alone, at a festival.
Really? It was released over here?
Not theatrically, I think, just at the festival.
Because I wasn’t able to get it on DVD over here, so I had to download it, and the subtitling was pretty poor, it was just some guy’s take on the translation, nothing official. I think it’s banned over here.
No, no, it was not even released on DVD in England, it was just on… eh… VHS. It wasn’t banned.
Okay, I was surprised that it wasn’t available, especially given that Irreversible is, I suppose, quite a popular arthouse DVD over here, and is more graphic than I Stand Alone. They’re two very different films. Has your general outlook changed at all over your career? I mean, Enter The Void certainly isn’t as angry a film as Irreversible.
I don’t think it’s an angry film, really. When you try to make a film about murder, rape, war or whatever, either you go and you show it or you avoid your subject for commercial reasons…
I suppose when I said “angry”, maybe a better word would be “fatalistic”…?
In a way I would say my first feature was more angry ‘cos I had less money, and it was very difficult to produce it… Eh, but at the same time it was a funny movie and Irreversible is also a bit funny and maybe this film [Enter The Void] is the least funny of the three, even if it’s more sentimental and less graphic.
The graphicness of your films is the subject of much controversy, is this something you actively court?
I’m not going for the controversy, no, it’s secondary to the filmmaking, where you’re trying to make movies that you like watching yourself or stuff that you haven’t seen before. Some people might have a problem with that, but to get the film financed – sometimes the controversy can help a film so the producers are saying that it’s an audacious movie in order that people will go to see it. But for the director, it’s just a case of making the movie that you would like to make. I know that sometimes I buy this magazine called – I don’t know what it’s called where you’re from – but over here it’s Detective, it’s got all these real crime stories and I buy it – not often, maybe once every four months – and the stories are so dramatic that they give you lots of ideas for things, but if you were to try to transfer them into a movie they would be very conventional, the audience can see the make-up and the lighting and the acting by the time you’re finished the story that you had read, which was just three pages long, is more powerful than any film adaptation.
So the formal properties of the film are what’s particularly important?
The thing is that, with cinema, people are so used to watching movies and things on TV that there comes a point where you don’t trust anything on screen. So that’s when, sometimes, some directors push the limits just to get an emotional reaction. Even kids watching horror movies know that nobody really died, or they know that the actress who dies will be coming up next week in another movie.
Of course now we have direct access, on the internet, to footage of people being actually killed.
Yeah, I saw one the other day – my friend told me I should check it out – and it was the coldest and most terrifying image of murder that I have seen, and it was committed by these kids. I don’t know how this can be put on the ‘net!
There’s a video up of three guys killing a man with a hammer…
Where are they from?
Somewhere in Eastern Europe, I think.
That must be what I saw, it’s a man next to a road and these two kids beside him. The terrifying thing about it is they kill him just like they were killing a fish or something.
It’s kind of fucked up that these are the kinds of things we have access to and yet I’ve watched Irreversible countless times and certain scenes have never gotten less harrowing. There’s an immediate quality to the film that forces those processes on you, like a ‘dream-state’ filled with this awful violence.
That’s one of the qualities that the new film has, is that it’s hypnotic, and you get drawn into the ‘dream-state’ and even if you don’t follow the story, the imagery is interesting, beautiful enough that you can move through it like that.
Enter The Void takes it to another level, visually – I mean, you talk about wanting to make films that you haven’t seen before and this is certainly one of those.
Or films that are a mixture of things you’ve seen before, I mean I love 2001: A Space Odyssey, I
love Salo, I love some aerial shots from Brian De Palma’s movies and some from I Am Cuba… and you take all these elements from movies that you like and put them in one project and call it your project and…
Is that a kind of reductive view of your role as a director?
I think people who maybe don’t work in the film industry think it’s a lot more magical than the directors might necessarily. It’s very, very difficult to make a movie, to get the visual elements correct and the acting, et cetera, and I would say that, for a film director, it’s all about doing magic tricks and you enjoy that other people believe them but you don’t believe in them yourself. If you do documentary, that’s another game, I guess, and I’d love to do a documentary on something that interests me at some point. I don’t know what that might be though. I was watching this one called Lake Of Fire by Tony Kaye and it was so powerful. I could continue doing narrative movies or experimental movies and still try documentary; there’s no urgency to get it finished and…
You might have less problems with censorship as well.
Well, I’ve never had problems with censorship; the problems I’ve had have been to do with the finishing date or financial difficulties. For example, on my latest movie the visual effects were very expensive, even though the effects company was co-producing the movie but at a point you would keep going, re-arranging things, but then there comes a point where you can’t pay people involved in editing.
The visual effect that stuck with me from Enter The Void is the inter-vaginal shot of the penis ejaculating –
Yes, the money shot! (laughs)
How much did that cost?
Eh, the visual effects company was co-producing it so I don’t know how much it cost, but it was just one guy working on that shot for like a month and a half.
One man?!
Yeah! At one point we had about a hundred graphic artists working on the visual effects, but that particular shot was only one guy.
I know you’ve rejected an auteurist approach to discussing your films, but do you see any thematic or philosophical consistencies to your work up to this point or do you see them as individual projects?
Yeah… I think the word “philosophy” is too strong, but I recognise my tastes and see certain topics as being of interest to me. All my films have scenes with tunnels, sex scenes, they have accidents and people losing the people they love the most, but at a point those things can also be gimmicks where you use them in all your films cos they worked before and… it’s too much to call it philosophical, it’s just like a person, when they do something right, they do it twice…
A constant search for approval, perhaps.
(laughs) Yes, perhaps I am just another mammal, in need of affection.
That’s funny because that impassive way of looking at humanity is certainly there in Enter The Void and, indeed, I Stand Alone where you take quite a Darwinian approach to viewing the Butcher’s life, with the intertitle saying “Survival is a genetic law”…
Yeah, the reaching for the affection of your mother, which is very evident in this one [Enter The Void]. But The Butcher was abandoned by his mother and raped as a foster child, and nobody loves him and he thinks that his daughter is the only one who can possibly do that. Some people this didn’t sit so well with.
The critical reception to your films, particularly of Irreversible … you must have been aware that there might be backlash, like when you filmed the rape scene?
At the end of the day, it’s just a representation of a rape. As a magician, doing a trick, I was very proud, as was Monica Belluci. In real life, I think there is nothing less funny than rape, but it is something that happens in reality. I don’t think it’s an appealing scene anyway, it’s obviously not supposed to be. Some people just want to get excited about something.
There are always criticisms that get levelled at anyone who attempts to push the boundaries of an art beyond what might be considered palatable for mass audiences.
I was lucky that Irreversible got financed without a script. We only had three pages going in, without knowing how the film would look at the end. With the new film, we had a 120-page script, far more detailed, with far more discussion on what would happen in the film, what we would show or not show, the abortion, et cetera.
There were people who walked out when I saw it at the Jameson Film Festival who maybe weren’t aware of what they were going to see… some French melodrama or something… But I think it was the formal elements of the film, the cinematography, that they found so difficult.
This is what people are complaining to me most about! I haven’t been blamed for any of the graphic content of the film, like with Irreversible, what they complain about is the strobing effects, the POV shots, that the main character is dead for the second half of the movie…
The people I went to the cinema with, we were almost in a trance after five minutes watching this film, like nothing we’d ever seen before…
I know some people were not entranced, or didn’t want to get trapped by the movie, some people really hated it because of this experience that they didn’t like. For me, the film is a trip – a bad trip, a good trip – most acid or mushroom trips are a bit of both, but some people resist that kind of thing.
Did you have any stumbling blocks with producers and the like, getting the film made?
No, no, there wasn’t much interference, not really with the abortion scene but… the scene with the girl screaming at the end, with the car crash, there were people saying “it’s too much” and it’s shocking. Certain people try to convince you of things… And with distribution companies it’s like everyone in the company has his opinion of what the film should be like, but you have to find the few people that you trust and listen to them. It’s one thing listening to these people and taking advice, but you mustn’t allow others to shape the project.
Enter The Void is on release from the 27th.
Words: Oisín Murphy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKRxDP–e-Y
