Gaspar Noé,
Alone against the world

Posted on october 13, 2016 at 10am

Given a rockstar ovation by a juvenile public, Noé spoke for about 90 minutes, the time of a film, with unbridled freedom. He answered questions asked by perhaps the most familiar presence, his friend Vincent Maraval, who finances, produces and sells his films. Giving a shout out in the theater to one of his actors of Enter the Void, Cyril Roy, in attendance, and the graphic artist who creates his posters, Laurent Lufroy - "because we forget about movie posters, despite films like A Clockwork Orange, which are identified by their poster..."- the author of Love and Irreversible tackled all subjects - including contentious ones. Highlights.

© Institut Lumière / Photo Julien Roche

Love of cinema

Why did I become a filmmaker? Because I was more a consumer of films and comics than anything else! I could paint, but when your father is a painter, and great one, there's no sense in trying to compete. Besides, I never liked the art dealers around my father. That's why the art dealer character I play in Love gets a bottle broken on his head.

My first memory of the cinema is television. I was three years old, watching Jason and the Argonauts [Don Chafffey, 1963 special effects by Ray Harryhausen]: the skeleton battles remained in my memory. My parents were cinephiles, especially my mother. I saw 2001, A Space Odyssey [Stanley Kubrick, 1968] when I was six, then I wanted to see it over and over, perhaps because it was hallucinogenic, at an age when these substances are prohibited for children.

I grew up in Buenos Aires. The grandfather of my best friend was a cinema cashier and knew all the other cashiers in the city, I could see all the movies I wanted for free, even those forbidden for children. I arrived in Paris in 1977, at the age of thirteen: it was full of cinemas and on TV, one could still see a film at 8.30pm like Deliverance [John Boorman, 1972), with no censorship, except for a white square. There were also two film clubs on Friday and Sunday nights... Today, cinephilia happens through the Net, but I have never downloaded a movie.

Love of technique (and technology)

I was not very good in French, arriving from Argentina. I found myself on a math track. Afterwards, I got my Baccalaureate C at age 17, from the Louis Lumière School, an establishment that prepares you to be a chief operator, cameraman or camera assistant. During my two years of study, I developed a taste for using the camera myself, even though I'm a disaster with the fine-tuning buttons. There are few cameramen who let go. If I knew them, I'd let go of the camera! It's true that I like new technology like 3D and virtual reality. There are new endoscopic camera formats that are inspiring. What could I do to the image with these new toys? Have you tried VR goggles? It's not the cinema, it's something else, but we can incorporate the artifices of film language into it. It is a new art, developing a new toy and I want to play!

When we shot Carne and I Stand Alone, with money from short programs of Canal Plus - without Alain de Greef, I would probably not be a director today - the format we chose, 16mm, pieced together in scope, made camera movements impossible. That's why after I wanted to make films where the camera flies. And for the 3D version of Love, we were stuck: when Vincent Maraval proposed I shoot in 3D, he had already announced it to the press! I did not even know which cameras to use. 3D devices are behemoths: I tried three steadycams, and blew through all three of them! They were too heavy, after a minute the camera would fall to the side... That's why the movie is in static shots.

 
Writing and the actors

I often go without a script, with just a few pages: there were seven in Irreversible, three for Love. Everything is done on set. I like to let the actors speak in their own words. The script for Enter the Void provided details on the visuals. I had overdone it. We had to submit them to the TV channels, decision makers - now I wouldn't be able to tolerate that... In the end, I couldn't stand it! Paz de la Huerta asked me to give her the script, but I did not want her to learn the lines... There is a psycho-rigid side with the idea of ​​filming exactly what was written, or on a storyboard. You have to be excited you arrive on set, to feel like you're going on vacation with the crew, or going to a party with them. When I hear about filming that goes wrong, I wonder why these directors make movies - we're not there to suffer!

Vincent Maraval would perhaps prefer that I shoot with more famous actors, to better sell my films, but I want to make films with people I get along well with - Cassel, Bellucci, Dupontel… on Irreversible, we were friends. And I like new faces. With well-known actors, there is always the risk of associating them with movies you don't like.

Documentaries

Perhaps my next project will be a documentary, they interest me. I prefer the docs by Werner Herzog over his fictional films. The movie by Andrew Dominik on Nick Cave, One more time with feeling, that caught the attention of my chief-op Benoît Debie, where the rocker talks about the death of his son during the recording of a new album, I found very moving. I shot a short documentary, AIDS, 2006, in Burkina Faso, which was then integrated into a feature film. This interested me and touched me: I was interviewing a patient who was dying, who believed that AIDS was a punishment from God, and he began to talk as if it were a testamentary work. I had also thought of making a documentary on sex: I wanted to film my friends fucking. At first, they accepted it, and then finally, after a certain period of time, they all refused.

 
Censorship

I'm not a provocateur. Do we say that Fassbinder or Pasolini were provocateurs? My films are like life. We make movies thinking of the books we read, the movies we see and our own lives. What is curious is that Love is banned in Turkey, even though Irreversible was a major success, beating Amelie. So you have the right to represent violence against women, but if you just show a couple making love, the world can tale a torch it, including in the United States? This is nonsense, right?

Meanwhile, pornography shows things that look nothing like the sexuality of people. And armed violence is omnipresent on Instagram, but showing the tiniest bit of a tit is censored... People ask: why did you need to show a dick in "Love"? But that's life: my dick. I love it more than my hand; it's my best friend. I'd rather have my hand cut off...

 
Cinephilia and references to other films

Oh, I see much fewer films that Quentin Tarantino. I was seated across him at lunch, and he mentions movies that I don't know at all. The colors in Enter the Void can make one think of Kenneth Anger; the camera movements are like De Palma's, and the Tokyo scenes are similar to Blade Runner. But in Love, the reference is more life than the cinema. Otherwise, I like films by Michael Haneke, Lars Von Trier, those by Todd Solondz make me piss laughing. I like the last two Kechiches, films by director Cristian Mungiu, Werner Herzog, Alain Cavalier. And yes, I find Jean-Paul Rouve great in "Les Tuche 2 : Le rêve américain."

 
Music

I have very broad tastes. In Irreversible, you hear "A la queuleuleu"... and then Beethoven. Thomas Bangalter, the half of Daft Punk who composed the soundtrack, was a little worried, "But you'll take 'A queuleuleu', off the CD?" A great app is Shazam. You hear music at a club or in a taxi and it identifies the song for you. Afterwards, on my computer and on my cell phone, I rate them with stars. The songs I love get 5 stars. I knew in Love, I would use famous tracks, because they help identify moments in life. I warned Vincent Maraval we would need to devote one-tenth of the budget to the music. Arriving at editing, I took the songs that had 5 stars on my hard drive to try them out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The first track that worked was Maggot Brain by Funkadelic.

Aurelien Ferenczi