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GASPAR NOE COLLECTS HOOKER CARDS

Every film writer on the planet has infected the internet with their Top 10/20/100 films of the year/decade at the end of 2009. I've had no desire to contribute to this sickness, and in any case, the mere concept of one film being better than all the other films is cretinous. HOWEVER, Gaspar Noé's Irréversible, the notorious rape/revenge film told backwards, starring France's leading couple Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci, is, in its own ways, more powerful and visceral than anything else I've seen in the cinema in the past ten years, and it keeps coming back to me.

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Much of the film was improvised, and from the first to last frame, there's nothing in it that isn't utterly convincing. From the brutality in the hardcore gay club The Rectum to the infamous nine-minute rape scene, from the drunken, coked-up party to the tenderness of the love scenes, every second of the film rings true. It's as beautiful as it is horrific.

I first met Gaspar when I interviewed him in 2002. I spent the afternoon visiting London's film poster shops and galleries with him as he hunted down new additions for his collection of Kubrick's 2001 posters. Meanwhile, he darted in and out of phone boxes, ripping down prostitute cards for one of his other collections. His follow-up to Irréversible, the long-awaited Enter The Void, is set for release in a few months (read our interview with him about that here), but I called him up to look back at the film that made him world famous.

There have been a lot of interminably predictable end of decade film lists recently, and I just wanted to talk about Irréversible because it affected me the most.
It's funny, I was talking about this to a friend the other day and one of the best films of the decade, in my opinion, is 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, the Romanian film. I also saw in The Times last week, their best films of the decade, and one I agree with was the documentary Capturing The Friedmans.

That is great.
And technically, there are moments in Avatar that are kind of amazing, especially if you see it with the Dolby 3D glasses.

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Did you like the film?
I thought it was big, it was huge. There are moments where for the first time in my life I watched a 3D movie and I didn't mind the technique, I really enjoyed it. With those Dolby glasses I saw it with, you can move your head around and see everything, the experience was really amazing.

Do you generally like James Cameron films?
He's making them bigger and bigger and I really enjoy the experience, of course. He's very American, even if Avatar wants to be anti-Imperialistic, he's very American in the way he shows who the good guys and the evil guys are, but technically the experience was amazing.

Do you watch a lot of Hollywood films?
Actually I really like that movie directed by James Cameron's ex-wife, The Hurt Locker.

Kathryn Bigelow. She did Point Break.
The Hurt Locker is definitely her best movie ever. But no I'm not a big fan of Hollywood movies, I get bored very quickly. I used to see them in the 70s and 80s, but nowadays I'd rather go to see Japanese or European movies. I really enjoyed Antichrist.

I did an article here for Vice recently on all the posters for Antichrist.
Oh, send it to me. Any of them any good? The French poster was kind of dull.

It was a little romantic.
Yeah, a couple kissing, with some arty font. Weirdly, Lars von Trier makes great movies but his posters are not very good. Out of all his movies, the only poster I saw that was kind of good was an advance poster for Dancer In The Dark. It had just letters on it, like when you go to an optician and they ask you to read the letters and they get smaller and smaller.

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Right, because Björk gets increasingly blind throughout the film.
I keep on spending all my money on posters.

Are you in control of the posters for your own films?
I try as much as I can. If you really dislike a poster and you ask the studio to not use it, you have to be open to be all proposals, and if they refuse to change what you don't like, all you can do is refuse to do the campaign. And usually at that point they end up making a compromise and change the poster, because they need you to do the interviews.

What was the poster for Irréversible, was it that shot of Monica from the back, in the tunnel?
Yeah, some countries wanted to have a sexy photo of Monica. They were quite respectful with Irréversible. Actually, if you come to them with a strong image, usually they like to keep it. For Seul Contre Tous [Gaspar's first feature film], my favourite poster of all was the British poster.

What was it?
It was by the Chapman Brothers. It was Philippe Nahon's face in front of a piece of meat. It was a photo-montage, but it was much better than the original one, or any other one.

I didn't know the Chapmans did film posters.
Me neither. But someone in the film company knew them. In any case it was by far the best poster for that movie.

Last time I saw you, you were also stealing prostitute cards from phone boxes.
Heh. Yeah, I have a collection.

Do you still do that?
Yeah. I have many on my wall. I like the ones that say 'I like my job.'

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How many have you got?
About 300. Actually there are not many countries where you can get those besides England.

Yeah, there are lots of them here.
They have some on the pages of Japanese magazines, but if you don't read Japanese you can't read what they say.

Maybe you should publish a book of your favourites.
I don't have enough. I'm sure someone in England has a more interesting collection.

I'm sure. So, Irréversible – is it still something you get people talking to you about a lot?
Actually, weirdly I think it's one of the most seen movies in France. If someone steals my cellphone in the street, or I get arrested, or if I'm too drunk and the police stop me, two thirds of the cops have seen it. If I get into a cab, one cab driver out of two has seen it. If I'm in Argentina or Japan or anywhere in the world, if I talk about the movie there's one chance out of three that someone has seen it. I never expected it to be so commercially successful or that it would be seen so much around the world.

What sort of things do you hear from people on the street?
I hear so many stories from guys who couldn't have sex with their girlfriends for ages after watching it together. And people are surprised that I'm the director of that movie.

Why, do they expect the director of Irréversible to look like something from Tom Of Finland?
I suppose they expect some tall fat bald pervert.

Have you had positive feedback from rape victims who've seen the film?
Yes. Actually, women like the movie more than men. It's weird, maybe because in the rape scene, whether you're a man or a woman you identify with Monica. Every woman has thought about rape, or might have been confronted with something close to it, and many men get lost in the rape scene because they identify with her too. And mostly, when people were walking out of cinemas during the rape scene it was men, not women. And on Imdb.com, women rate the film higher than men. It's the same with Antichrist, some people were saying Lars von Trier was misogynist, but at the end, women like the movie much more than men.

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Ok. So, Enter The Void's in the can now, but it's been eight years since Irréversible; what took so long between films?
Enter The Void, which is due to be released in most countries in April, had two years of pre-production, a year of shooting, two years of post-production, so it took five years. It's not that expensive, but it took me a long long time to finance it and a long long time to post-produce it because it's full of visual effects. And that's maybe why I want to do an easy project now, something I can shoot quickly like Irréversible, which, from the moment I thought of the idea until it was released, took a year. I don't want to get into another five-year project.

You actually came up with the idea for Irréversible really quickly after Vincent and Monica said no to your porn film, right?
Yeah, but mostly I wanted to do Enter The Void, and I couldn't start it so I came up with this idea for an easy porn project, and when I proposed it to Vincent and Monica they said yes, and then they read the script and they said no.

Why did they say no, what changed their mind?
I suppose when you're a couple as famous as they are, the only thing you have left is your sexual intimacy, and I guess they didn't want to share that with the rest of the world. Whether you're Vincent Cassel or Tom Cruise, you feel invaded by people all the time, and if you cross the line and show yourself having sex with your own partner, then people will invade you even more. And I guess they were having problems handling their celebrity. It wasn't that they were shy, but it would increase those sort of problems tenfold. I can understand it, because if you're having sex with someone you love in front of the camera, it seems less like you're playing a character and more like you're being yourself, and I don't think they wanted to do that. Monica didn't mind simulating a rape scene, and he didn't mind that she did that, but sexual contact with each other for real, they'd be invaded by a film crew, and invaded in real life.

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There is some intimate sexual contact between them in the film though.
Yeah, they're naked on the bed, but there's nothing arousing about it. People who are good to have sex scenes in a movie are mostly people who have nothing to lose, and also things to earn, people can get famous for doing it.

Eva Green did quite a bit of it in The Dreamers, the Bertolucci film.
Yeah, it was her first movie, and I don't know if she was dating Michael Pitt, but they weren't a long-term couple. Most people who are really famous have issues with celebrity, photographers around them. Even myself, I have so many people pretending they're me on Facebook. I'm not that famous, but I'm a film director and people use my name. Anyway, yes, we moved from this erotic film project that I had to Irréversible.

I read somewhere that now you're done with Enter The Void you might go back to do that one.
Yeah, I want to do it.

What is it, is it actually porn you want to do?
Yeah, but when I say erotic it's more arousing, I mean. I've already had some explicit sex in my films, but I've never shot something that I think is arousing.

The scenes between Vincent and Monica in your film do have an incredible intimacy though. How did you get the most out of their relationship? Their chemistry seems completely genuine, as opposed to Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's in Eyes Wide Shut.
In most cases in cinema you don't believe that two people love each other. I've not seen many movies where you feel people are having real sex, or that you believe they're in love.

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What about when you watch Irréversible, is it real to you, having shot it yourself?
Yeah, I think for example at the end when they're naked on the bed, I would say that was the maximum they wanted to give of their intimacy. But yeah, when he's tickling her or when they're talking… even on the train when [actor] Albert Dupontel's asking them about sex, that wasn't in the script at all. There's a point where Monica and Vincent were really surprised, and you can feel this weird energy going on, because no one ever talks to them like that. And yeah, the scene in the bedroom, you can tell they're a real couple.

And there are some bits where they really seem to get lost in the moment, like in the party where he accidentally says his name's Vincent [instead of his character's name, Marcus], and you kept it in.
Yeah, that night we were all very drunk, even myself. If you want people to act drunk on the set you can actually get them drunk, yeah it's good. But I kept that in with him saying "Vincent" because I thought it was part of the fun. He had really forgotten he was in a movie.

I didn't know he was actually drunk. He looks it.
Yeah. It was a party, and I did it again in Enter The Void in a nightclub scene, you want people to have the energy of a party, so you bring as much alcohol as you can to the set and you get them all drunk and you put real music on and they start dancing, and at a point it turns into a real nightclub or a real party, and you forget you're shooting a movie. But those scenes are very difficult to shoot, much more difficult than sex or violence scenes.

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What about the Rectum scenes, I know you wanted people to look like they were out of their minds.
They were.

But what about people watching the film, with all those scenes with the low frequency noise and the swirling camera, especially in The Rectum, did you want viewers to feel like they were on something?
Actually I was thinking, with Irréversible, and some of Enter The Void, both movies are supposed to recreate some sort of altered sensibility or state of consciousness, using cinematic weapons, sound, image, editing, whatever you can use to make it work. Many people say Enter The Void is hypnotic, whether that's good or bad, people think "What the fuck is happening, my eyes, my ears."

It's great, in the Rectum sequence, how the intellectual, sensitive guy [played by Albert Dupontel] turns out to be the one who really loses it. Did you draw on personal experiences for that primal rage aspect of the film?
I feel more linked to Vincent Cassel's character than Albert Dupontel's. But at the same time, when you get into those situations you can never tell how you're going to react. Some people keep control of themselves, some people lose control. In a similar situation, I don't know how I would behave. For sure I would not try to control myself.

You've said before that you get into a few fights here and there.
If I hear fighting in the street I get as close as I can, I try to save the situation, once I understand what's going on, who you can help. I've got in trouble a few times putting myself in these situations.

Have you ever badly injured anyone?
I don't know; I've never got into any really heavy fights with weapons.

When do you end up fighting, when you're drunk?
I argue when I'm drunk. I don't fight when I'm drunk, I argue. I've got into some fights sober. At a point you become aware of the danger of getting into a serious fight so you try to avoid that final point. If you try to separate people who are fighting, at a point you get smashed in the face, you smash back that person, they're not really trying to fight you, they're just not willing to be separated.

Did you get any violent reactions from Irréversible?
Not really, although once I was in Telluride and people were saying to me "Be careful, this film director saw your movie and he wants to smash your face in," so I said "Ok, send him over, tell him that I have a blade and I love fighting." Actually I didn't have a blade, I never carry a blade, but what can you say to that.

Who was it?
I can't tell you.

ALEX GODFREY