Uh Oh, It’s Him Again

INTERVIEW BY ALEX GODFREY

IMAGES COURTESY OF LAURENT LUFROY AND GASPAR NOÉ

I first met Gaspar Noé in 2002, just before his groundbreaking rape-revenge drama

Irréversible

was released. I was due to interview the film’s stars that day as well, but Vincent Cassel got hold of the magazine I was working for at the time, said I would make his wife (Monica Bellucci) look like a whore, and banned me from meeting either of them. Instead I spent the afternoon with Gaspar trawling around London’s poster galleries as he added to his collection of Kubrick’s

posters.

It’s taken eight years for his follow-up to come out, but he’s been planning

Enter the Void

for a long time, before

Irréversible

even. Another

Vice

correspondent spent some time

with him for our Film Issue

last year, but a few weeks ago I went to a screening of the final, finished cut of the film, and came out with my molecules rearranged. Gaspar spent five years making his opus, which tackles hallucination and reincarnation in Tokyo, and it’s paid off—watching the film is a bit like starring in your own version of

Total Recall

, except you’re not a spy, you’re a dead junkie watching your sister’s life as a stripper in Tokyo’s red-light district quickly unravel. I liked the film a lot, especially how it looks, and so this is why

Vice

is talking to Gaspar about it all again, even though we ran a piece on him last year.

I mean, give us a break—90 percent of other magazines have interviews with the same people in them every fucking month, plus we have

a documentary showing on VBS now

where we hang out with Gaspar in Tokyo.

Anyway, for this, Gaspar and I met for breakfast in Soho and he told me he hadn’t had any sleep because he’d got into a fight the night before. He didn’t go into the details, and tried to wake himself up with a plate of fruit.

Vice: So when we spoke the other day I told you how much I loved this film. Are you happy with it?

Gaspar Noé:

With the movie or that you liked it? Ha. Yeah, really happy with the movie. Is it the first time you’ve seen it?

Yeah. I want to see it again.

You should try to see the longer version. The longer version has nine reels, the shorter has eight. You can pull out reel seven and the movie still works.

Why did you cut it?

I had to sign a contract saying if the movie was above two hours and 20 minutes I would do a shorter version, and I just cut a whole reel. Reel seven starts just after the abortion scene, and ends with her throwing her brother’s ashes in the sink.

Right. Hopefully I’ll see it somehow. What’s it like for you to be through with this now, after having wanted to make it for so long? What is it, 20 years since you had your first ideas for this?

The first idea I had was to make a movie that would be seen from the point of view from the main character while he comes out of his body, a near-death experience movie, that would follow the main character far after the moment of his death.

Enter the Void

is influenced by a few different movies:

2001, Videodrome, Altered States

. And I’ve tried lots to come out from my body and have an astral projection.

How? Sleep deprivation?

Sleep deprivation, hypnosis… I never had a car crash. People sometimes say that if they have a huge accident sometimes they can see themselves from above. But I believe that some hallucination is linked to the fact that one of the first senses that you lose is the equilibrium in your ears. So if you have a car crash and are anaesthetised when you’re operated on, they anaesthetise your ear and then your equilibrium. So if your brain is awake you imagine you’re floating above yourself with the images you kept in mind from the space you were in. And that’s how they explain, logically, what astral projections are. In my case, I believed for a while when I was 18, 20, that the mind or spirit could come out of the body, and I tried it by stopping breathing, things like that.

It didn’t work?

Didn’t work. I did some hallucinogenics also; I was trying hard to come out of my body, but it never worked.

Gaspar Noé during the filming of the Vice Guide To Film episode in Tokyo

You’re a big fan of Kubrick’s 2001. Did you want to recreate how you feel when you saw that for the first time?

That was maybe the biggest cinematic shock I’ve had in my life.

How old were you?

Six, seven. I saw it when I was a kid and I felt like I was on drugs at that age, especially when it came to the last scenes, the Star Gate sequence. And actually Douglas Trumbull [special effects supervisor on

] was president of the jury in a film festival in Switzerland last week, and I got the main award from him and I was so happy, because he and Kubrick gave me my first drug ever, at the age of six. And I was so proud that he gave me the award for my movie. That made my week. I learned about the award too late to go to Switzerland. I have to send him an email about it.

How much has your own drug-taking influenced this film?

Since I was a teenager I was curious, I was smoking joints from time to time, doing acid, a mushroom here, a mushroom there, but I was not a big pot-head or drug experimentalist. But from the moment I decided I would do a movie that would portray hallucinations, maybe around 23, 24, I would from time to time do drugs to bring back images for this future movie I wanted to make. Or maybe I was just using that as a pretext to do the drugs. The last thing I discovered ten years ago, I went to the Peruvian jungle and I did some ayahuasca. But most of the time it wasn’t to party, it was because I had in mind this movie about altered states. I read one book by Carlos Castaneda, recommended by my mother, but then I read his biography and he was a liar, he was cheating everybody, but he was a very good writer. But yeah, it opens your mind, it can puzzle you. I’m not into psychedelics any more at all. I won’t say that one day I won’t come back to them, but for the moment I’m done with it.

One of the most interesting things in the film is the fact that he’s tripping when he dies and he isn’t even sure what’s happening to him. What have you researched in that area, regarding people being on drugs at the moment of death?

Not much besides Aldous Huxley, who injected LSD to die peacefully. That book also influenced me,

The Doors of Perception

, when I was 16, 17, when I was smoking joints. I know that many people have said that if you’re having a really strong LSD or mushroom or ayahuasca trip you can experience moments during which you think you die, then you notice you’re not dead, you come back to life, and you think you’re having a rebirth. Timothy Leary was reading the

Tibetan Book of the Dead

to people who were on acid, to open their minds, a kind of shamanic text used to help people to trip in certain directions. He made the

Tibetan Book of the Dead

popular again in the United States. It’s kind of weird that it had to go through him to reach a big audience in the Western world. I believe the images you see when you’re dying are dreams, but most people when they wake up from a near-death experience don’t remember anything. In some cases I believe they’re recreated dreams to make people lose their fear of death. It’s so common, people invent memories just to make themselves stronger or save themselves from shame. But also, the ultimate shame is to die too young without accomplishing your dreams. So at a point if you have a car crash or whatever, and you know you were dead and then woke up, that means it could have been the end of everything. So maybe it’s a human need to believe in life after death, as it is a human need for some people to believe in flying saucers. But all these books about near-death experiences, and all these books about astral projections, they always come to the same imagery, and I thought it was very funny to portray that, a sort of international dream that people want to see represented. But then I don’t subscribe to any religion or cult, and I didn’t want to make people believe that reincarnation really exists.

Were there things you wanted to do with the drug scenes that you thought hadn’t been done well in other films?

Well, I think the opening DMT scene looks great, but it doesn’t look like DMT. It’s more geometric. I tried. I don’t know how to use computers like that, so I was giving references to the crew. Whoever’s had DMT or ayahuasca, they’ll know it’s close to this, but it’s more

Tron

-esque. There’s something kind of friendly, it’s all made of bright lines and it’s moving all the time. The imagery in this film is more classical than what DMT’s actually like. But I’m really happy with it. Some directors really portray hallucinations well. There’s a master of the experimental scene from the 60s called Jordan Belson, who Kubrick wanted to collaborate with on

2001.

I think he refused, but there are a few shorts he did, one was called

Samadhi

and one called

Bardo

, and they really look like what you see when you’re on mushrooms and you close your eyes. When you take enough they really induce some sort of altered state.

When I spoke to you in January you told me how much you’d really enjoyed the experience of seeing Avatar in 3D. Was that something you were really going for with this film, to push the boundaries and give people a different cinematic experience?

You never know who your audience is going to be, but you know what you want to see yourself and what your friends want to see. And you know, maybe, how you’re going to convince people to give you their money. But you can never tell what’s going to be the big audience reaction, and in a way you don’t care about them because it’s too abstract. You care about some individuals who you respect and whose tastes you share, but it’s very hard to think of an audience. You can think of their reactions sometimes, like in the car crash scene you think people in the audience are going to jump. But when it comes to the rest you don’t know what to expect. And actually, I’ve had the weirdest, the most passionate reactions of my whole life, both good and bad, with this movie. For sure it’s the least violent of all my movies, but cinematically it’s more disturbing, because it’s more like an experience, and people don’t know where they stand, what’s going on in the screen or inside their head. It’s not a moral statement, it’s not a verbal movie like

Seul Contre Tous

, it’s not about a traumatic moment where people can discuss the merits of a certain image, like the rape in

Irréversible

. With this it’s more like, “What the fuck is this? He’s playing with my ears, my eyes. Why is it so long? Why is it so colourful? Why does he pretend there’s life after death?” Although the movie doesn’t actually pretend that at all. But some people have really turned crazy on this one, for better or worse.

You’ve said that Irréversible was in some ways a trial run for this film.

Yeah. The thing is, I had already finished a version of the script for

Enter the Void

and I was trying to finance it in Germany and France, it was supposed to be a co-production, and unfortunately it fell apart. That was the summer of 2001, so I was getting ready to prepare it, then I met Vincent [Cassel] in a club and we said, for a joke, “Why don’t we make a movie together?” Then we started this project with no script, but because we had him and Monica Bellucci, we got lots of money to make that movie—no script, no title, just the concept of doing a rape/revenge movie told backwards. So when we started shooting that, with just a three-page synopsis, I stole ideas from my main project. There are many elements, like the master shots, the crane shots flying above that scene where Vincent is arrested, and it was like I was rehearsing for

Enter the Void

. And also some of the things we did digitally in

Irréversible

were a way for me to get ready to do a film with a lot of visual effects.

Did it make you more confident to do what you then wanted to do?

Yeah, it made me more confident, but it also of course it made me more powerful. Because

Irréversible

was supposed to be a midnight hardcore movie and it became a big commercial success. So besides the fact that it helped me technically for

Enter the Void

, mostly it made it possible to finance

Enter the Void

a few years later. Before

Irréversible

I was just another French underground director, and after

Irréversible

I was a commercial underground director. This movie was expensive, and without

Irréversible

it would never have happened.

Did you do everything you wanted to do with this film?

The best ideas always come at the last moment. And of course the movie was so expensive, some of the ideas I had were refused for financial reasons. But actually it’s much better than I expected it to be. I really like it. But it’s weird because the movie was partly completed a year ago, then it was fully completed in January, then we took it to festivals, then it came out in France, and now I’m here. It’s like giving birth three times to the same baby and I’m kind of exhausted now. But I’m sure in a few months when I watch the movie again I’ll be really happy with it.

What were the ideas you didn’t get to do?

I wanted to do more effects like

Tron

, in the end at the Love Hotel. I wanted to recreate the lines of the corners of the apartment, of the street, like a wireframe model on a computer, it’s very psychedelic, it reminds you of

Tron

. And there were a few

Tron

-esque effects I wanted to add to the movie, because DMT creates

Tron

-esque sort of visuals, but everybody was exhausted by that point, the third cut of the film. It would have been much more time and work and money.

So there’s nothing you’d add to the film now if you had the chance?

No, nothing. There was in

Irréversible

, I always wanted to do one other shot of the love between Vincent and Monica, just to film them naked and kissing, but they didn’t feel like doing it, so we didn’t do it. But no, I don’t have any particular regrets with this.

Vice CEO Shane Smith and Gaspar Noé in Cannes for the Vice Guide to Film episode.

How did Enter the Void go down in France?

It was a very small release. It couldn’t work well because the same company who produced the movie released it, and they had spent so much money on the movie. After they saw the result, which is far more experimental than what they expected, they kind of got afraid of it, and they didn’t put posters on the street, and things like that like they do for most movies, and they released very few prints. The reviews were very extreme, they were mostly very good or totally offensive, there was almost nothing in between. It worked well for the small release they did, I think they expect it to be much bigger on DVD. There are some movies that people want to own, especially these kind of abstract psychological movies.

Have you had any censorship problems with the film?

In Japan they blurred the penis at the end.

Yeah, they do that, don’t they?

Yeah. And the penis is so huge on the screen, they blurred just the bit at the end of the penis where the sperm comes out, and they blurred some other genitals, although I haven’t seen the Japanese print. I’m sure in some countries like Hong Kong it will be problematic to release the movie. At one point the French censors they said they would have given it a 12 rating if it wasn’t for the car crash. They said that was the most intense scene in the movie, so they rated it 15 to make sure young kids who saw the movie wouldn’t get traumatised if they were in a car with their parents. In the United States it’s going to be released unrated.

OK. So how far are you with the erotic film you want to do?

I have a 15-page script. Maybe I should re-read it, because your life changes and you have new ideas. Maybe time is turning me more sentimental. But I think it’s going to be a very sentimental erotic movie.

Are you doing it next?

I hope so, but I’m still promoting this one and I don’t have the right energy to jump into another project immediately. It’s like getting into a tunnel.

What will make it different from other erotic movies?

Have you ever seen a good love movie with real sex in it?

Probably not.

Me neither. It’s not going to be a sadistic movie.

Well, that’s good. Do you think you’ll be using similar filmmaking techniques again?

I guess I’m going to try to make it as simple as possible. But before you get into a movie you want to define the rules of a game you haven’t played before, so for the moment I’ll keep on watching movies, and when I come up with the right cinematic concept then I’ll jump into it.

Enter the Void

is released in the UK on September 24.