'I’m just a man man trying to make pretty pictures'
Screenjabber's Neil Queen takes a trip with controversy-magnet Gaspar Noe ...
“Was Ken Russell an enfant terrible? Was Fassbinder? Was Nicholas Roeg? I’m not an enfant terrible, I’m just a director making films for a grown-up audience.” French director Gaspar Noe, one of the most provocative and controversial film-makers ever to freak the living shit out of cinemagoers, is trying to downplay his reputation to Screenjabber. It’s a reputation that is well earned, given that he’s the man who proved to movie audiences how little tolerance the human skull has to a fire extinguisher, and who’s caused outrage and faintings at Cannes, found himself on Total Film’s Most Terrifying Films Of All Time list and put Monica Bellucci through arguably the most notorious and harrowing rape sequence ever shot.
Curiously, the Gaspar Noe who made the revenge jaw-dropper Irreversible and the equally brutal I Stand Alone is at odds with the Gaspar Noe that’s sat in front of me. While I can’t vouch for what he’d be like if you bumped into him down a sex den in a red-light district when he’s got a bellyful of DMT and is feeling a bit fighty, in the flesh he’s quietly spoken, calm, rational, engaging, thoughtful and, dare I say it, quite normal.
Screenjabber is here to chat with him about his latest tour around the fringes of what’s morally acceptable, Enter The Void, a breathtaking, bold and visually stunning film of family ties, self-discovery, tragic loss and an absolute shedload of class-A drugs and graphic sex. It’s pretty heady stuff. “I was trying to create a rollercoaster that people would enjoy getting on, one that wouldn’t so much blow their emotions, but play with their perceptions and put them in an altered state of consciousness,” explains Noe. “I also wanted to make a movie that’s like what I see when I’m stoned on mushrooms or DMT.” Aided by Pierre Buffin’s BUF company - the VFX team who worked on Avatar, The Dark Knight and countless others - and heavily influenced by the Tibetan Book Of The Dead, Enter The Void attempts to recreate the crazy vistas of the psychedelic mindstate, hopefully with far greater accuracy than has ever been managed before: “99% of movies fail when they try to do hallucinogenic scenes. If you watch films like Altered States now, they look phoney. I tried to pick out all the good hallucinogenic scenes from movies, like the end of 2001 and Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration Of The Pleasuredome, ones that have the feeling of an out-of-body experience, then make a salad made up of those different elements.” Despite also citing Tron as a visual reference point, Disney it ain’t. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is ekeing out a living in Tokyo as a low-level drug dealer, kept company by his stripper sister Linda (Paz de la Huerte). After being fatally shot in a drugs bust, Oscar’s spirit takes leave of his body and floats above the city, honouring his lifelong promise to Linda that they’d never part, a pact given poignancy by the death of their parents – the cruel and traumatic act of fate that seems to be a cornerstone of Noe’s films.
With scripted scenes blended with improvised, Enter The Void counterpoints the other-worldly with the everyday, with believable characters who lend credibility to the incredulous - though it doesn’t always quite turn out as Noe planned it, as the incestuous subtext of Oscar and Linda’s relationship proves. “That wasn’t in the script, that came from Paz. She’s very transgressive and an exhibitionist. When we were filming the scene where she’s taken ecstasy, I said, ‘Oh, Paz, your nipple popped out, and don’t touch your brother like that, it looks like you’re trying to arouse him!’ She said: ‘Gaspar, you’re trying to censor me!’ It wasn’t deliberate, but it happened, so I left it in. Also, when Oscar smells her knickers, I left that too – it added a layer of complexity and trouble to the movie.”
This willingness to allow random acts to blow the film off course lends a loose, informal air to his films, reinforced by the director’s loathing of the traditional storytelling structure, first in the Memento-esque backwards narrative of Irreversible and repeated in the stream-of-consciousness of Enter The Void: “Conventional narrative is … conventional – and conventional is boring. When I watch movies I get bored. Bored of how the scenes are covered, bored when I feel that the dialogue has been learned and doesn’t come out naturally, so if I can do it in a way that’s unconventional and natural, for me, that’s much better. People are surrounded by images all the time, so they can’t trust what’s on the screen, so you have to create an emotion that refreshes their minds.” Of course, catching people’s attention is a lot easier when you pack the screen with the kind of imagery that Noe likes to immerse himself in: “I know my films are going to have an 18-rating, because I’m very obsessed with aspects of nature that are considered for adults, like sex – but it’s not about being controversial, it’s about how long you want to spend in an editing room with a certain subject. If the subject is conventional, you’ll get bored, because nothing talks to you. It’s not the pleasure of shocking, it’s the pleasure of what you can create with this tool called cinema. In a movie you can live out your dreams and desires – and also your fears. Enter The Void is quite long, so you have a panorama of my obsessions, like in my previous movies, but in this one it’s more evident.”
So it’s ironic then, given how much effort Noe expends distancing himself from the herd, that the production of Enter The Void owes a huge debt to the mainstream: “I was asked to direct the sequel to Altered States, but after reading the script I decided I preferred the original, and because Hollywood is doing all these remakes and Enter The Void was falling apart at the time, I told my production company that I was going to Hollywood to redo Altered States - so then they decided to finance Enter The Void. I’m happy I didn’t make the film with the American studio, as I wouldn’t have had the same freedom – but that movie triggered the production for this.”
As Noe is permanently parked up in controversy’s postcode, it’s safe to guess that Sex & The City 3 isn’t his next port of call. So what is? He hasn’t ruled out a rumoured “hyper-sexual love story in 3D”, but his focus may very well shift elsewhere: “If I can find a subject that interests me, I wouldn’t mind shooting a documentary, like Tony Kaye’s Lake Of Fire, which was a personal project about the fighting between pro-life and pro-choice campaigners. Documentaries teach you about real life, all movies teach you is the intentions of the director, and how they plan to make money to buy themselves a swimming pool. I’m more attracted to the real world than to the world depicted in movies.”