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Gaspar Noé Is Not in Control

Somehow, Gaspar Noé has returned. The controversial Franco-Argentine filmmaker (whose last film, Climax, was for some of us the best picture of 2019) is getting some of the best reviews of his career for his latest, Vortex, an impressively depressing split-screen drama about dementia and old age starring the Italian director Dario Argento and French actress Françoise Lebrun. Also in theaters right now is Lux Æterna, a positively insane 52-minute art thriller shot in split screen that Noé premiered at Cannes in 2019, featuring Béatrice Dalle playing herself as a director whose bizarre drama starring Charlotte Gainsbourg is spinning out of control right around her.

Lux Æterna originated as a short for a fashion brand and wound up being an experimental look at the chaos of making movies. Indeed, the loss of control has been Noé’s great theme since his earliest days — loss of control not just for his characters, but also for his viewers and for the director himself. To that end, his films have become increasingly improvisatory, shot and edited in seemingly record time. And he has never stopped trying to use cinema to cause physical reactions in the viewer. In Vortex, the split screen makes the characters’ alienation visceral. In Lux Æterna, not only does the split screen enhance the chaos onscreen, a strobing effect over the last ten minutes of the film is … well, excruciating, and intentionally so.

Both of these movies seem to be personal to Noé in intriguing new ways: Some of the inspiration for Vortex came from his experiences dealing with his own mother’s dementia, as well as a brain hemorrhage that almost killed him in early 2020.

Was it hard convincing Dario Argento to act in this film?
I’m very close friends with his daughter Asia. When I had the possibility to ask him to be in the movie, Asia said, “Oh, you should come to Italy to tell him about it.” But he didn’t know what it was about, so probably he thought I was coming to propose a horror movie or Climax 2 or something like that. I told him, “It’s about an old couple.” He said, “But I’m not old!” “I know you’re not old. You’re the enfant terrible of the Italian cinema!” But I think there were two things that made him say yes. The first one is that I talked about the film Umberto D. by Vittorio De Sica that he also loved, and the second is that I told him, “Hey, I just have a ten-page script and I would not write any dialogue for you to memorize. I’m going to be taking care of one of the cameras. You will be taking care of your character.” That made him more comfortable. He’s not an actor; he’s never had to remember lines.

On the other hand, Françoise Lebrun is a veteran actress. Was it a challenge for her to work without a real script?
She worried about who would play her husband. She knew the name Dario Argento, but she hadn’t seen his movies, so I gave her his autobiography and some of his films. She comes from a very different family of cinema, but both of them are so intelligent that they managed to get along from the moment they met. They’re a very believable couple. He used to be a screenwriter before being a director, but before being a screenwriter, he was a film critic, so I decided, “Yeah, you’ll play a film critic in the movie and you’ll improvise your dialogues.” And for Françoise, I said, “Sorry, but it’s not very important what you’re going to say because I want you to mumble all the time. I won’t really understand what you’re saying.” I think she was a bit stuffed the first day, but I brought her a lot of videos, taking scenes from documentaries, and also personal videos that I had done with my mother, and other videos of other people to show the different types of dementia that can hit a woman. I said, “Please, you have to play with your eyes in this movie more than with the words.” She said, “Okay, let me cook the character my way.” And it was perfect.

The use of the split screen heightens their alienation from one another. Tell me about the scene when the father reaches across and holds the mother’s hand — in the split screen, it becomes a very intense moment, like he’s reaching across worlds.
Do you mean with the grandson hitting the car with another car? You have on one side Dario and the little kid, and on the other side you have Françoise and Alex Lutz [who plays the elderly couple’s grown son, Stéphane], and they’re at a table. On the first take, the kid was hitting the car while the father and Stéphane were talking, and they would ask the kid to stop, and he would stop. So there was no real drama. I went to talk to the kid and said, “Hey, come with me to the kitchen,” and then I said, “You know, the guy who plays your grandfather is cool? And the guy who plays your father is cool?” “Yeah.” “But don’t listen to them, they’re very stingy. They will not give you gifts. And I know that you certainly want a nice gift.” He said, “Yes, yes, yes.” “What kind of gift would you like?” He said, “Oh, there’s this motorbike,” like a motorbike for kids who are four years old. I said, “You want that motorbike? If you manage to break the car with the other car, you will get your gift.” “Yes!” He was so happy. He came back to the table and then during the second take, he started hitting the car with the other car like he was on crack! You can tell that Dario and Alex are trying to stop him and he doesn’t want to stop. They don’t understand why he turned crazy.

Françoise, who certainly had planned something for the scene, was totally lost and she started crying. At that moment, Dario kept on playing his part, Alex was playing his part, and Françoise, instead of saying something, she was just crying, crying, crying. Then Dario, who I had not asked to take her hand, felt bad for her, and he crossed the table with his hand, and he said initially, “Are you okay, Françoise?” But in the editing process, I could rearrange and rerecord his voice to make him say, “Ça va, mon amour?” (“Are you okay, my love?”) That’s the magic of cinema. Sometimes things happen that you don’t expect. I never expected him to touch her and then [in the split screen] his arm seems like an extensible arm. It’s very weird visually, and the performances are all perfect.

Gaspar Noè on the set of Lux Aeterna.Photo: Tom Kan

Lux Æterna shows something that I think happens quite often. You have the director, Béatrice Dalle, and she’s losing control of her set, which happens on a lot of film shoots because everybody else down the line thinks they can do a better job than the director. I assume you could relate to her predicament.
Yeah, but I think also Béatrice Dalle is playing Béatrice Dalle in the movie. That’s how crazy she really can be in real life. She’s extremely funny, very bright, very hysterical, but her language is dirtier than the language of 99 percent of the guys I know in Paris. But yeah, those situations happen. Especially in the movie, the producer is a producer of commercials who wants to produce a feature film, and those power issues on the set are so much more common in the commercials industry, because you can turn everybody into a slave with money. The most unfriendly people I met in the film industry were actually in the advertisement industry.

What about the strobing effect in Lux Æterna? You open with Dostoyevsky’s line about the epileptic seizures and you end with what feels like ten minutes of just strobing lights. Which feels like an extension of your fascination with losing control. Were you trying to induce seizures in people?
The line about the epileptic seizures, it’s not about how bad a seizure can be, but it’s about how good it can be. It seems that there’s something enjoyable that I haven’t tried yet. If I could induce an epileptic crisis, probably I’ll just press a button, but it’s not so easy. I don’t know if anybody is going to have an epileptic seizure in a theater watching this movie, but I’ve seen many, many people hiding their eyes during the last five, ten minutes of the movie. I’m very proud of that. I really like the final credits. Among all the credits that I’ve done, that’s probably the most hypnotic. Also, I didn’t invent the flicker and I didn’t invent the color flicker. There were many experimental movies in the ’60s and ’70s by Paul Sharits, by Tony Conrad, playing with those stroboscopic frames or images that already were scandalous in their time because some people would feel weird among the audience.

The responses to Lux Æterna were interesting. When it premiered at Cannes in 2019, a lot of people interpreted it as your MeToo movie. I don’t know if that was actually intentional or if that was just because of the time when it was released. Was that on your mind when you made it?
No. It was inspired by shoots that I’ve assisted on. Lux Æterna was a proposal that came to me from Anthony Vaccarello, the artistic director of the Saint Laurent brand. He said, “Do whatever you want as long as you use the clothing of our brand and one or two or three high concepts of our brand.” My whole script was just two or three lines long. It wasn’t even a page. I told Béatrice and Charlotte to talk about witchcraft and about other film shoots, and they improvised. And it became a 52-minute movie after five days of shooting.

But also, you cannot disconnect yourself from the moment in which you’re shooting the movie. It’s good that there are some feminist speeches are out there, but I would probably have done the same movie ten years earlier if I had thought of it. It’s just how people describe the movie. Like ten years ago, no one would consider that a witch was a feminist, but now the word “witch” is used more and more among the feminists. My mother was a feminist. I never trusted a man who says, “I’m a feminist,” but yeah, I can be testosterophobic.

You can be what?
I can be testosterophobic. The male testosterone can be very boring and annoying and repetitive. So mostly in my movies, the girls have the cool parts and the men have the stupid parts.

I remember when we talked about Climax, you talked about how you shot it in February or something and then it was ready by May for Cannes. You’re making these movies faster and faster, it seems.
It’s because I want to show my movies in Cannes. I conceived of Vortex at the end of January of last year, we found a location in February, and we were shooting at the beginning of March. We finished on the 10th of April, I think. The Cannes Film Festival was not held in May last year. People said it would be delayed to October or November. So I said, “Oh, I have a few months to edit properly.” Then they decided that the festival would be held in July, so, shit, I have to hurry! I had to edit and do the sound editing and the sound mix very quickly because I couldn’t consider putting the movie in a closet for one year or to go to any other major festival — because there’s only one big festival and the other ones are just behind.

Does it matter to you at Cannes whether you’re in the Official Selection? Because I remember Climax was in Director’s Fortnight, which is actually a different, smaller festival.
I would even go to the Film Market! Even if I have to rent the screening room, I’d rather go to the film market in Cannes than to any other major festival. All my friends go there, so it’s like a movie party. I once went to Venice with the new cut of Irreversible. By the way, I can’t understand, I did a new version of Irreversible and it was never shown in the States or in Canada. It’s more shocking than the original one.

What’s the new version of Irreversible? Is it in chronological order now?
Yeah. I didn’t add anything. I even made it slightly shorter. I just used old elements and I put it in chronological order and the movie is more shocking and more violent. The original was very poetic because it had this concept of being told backwards. But now it ends up in total shit. [Laughs.]

Why did you do that?
Because it was possible! Because they asked me to find some extras for the Blu-ray edition, and I said, “Okay, I have an idea, I want to put the movie in chronological order.” And the result was so strong; it was released theatrically in Russia, in France, in Germany, in Japan. The truth is, if you see it, it’s more emotional, more dramatic, and … I wouldn’t say nihilistic, but evil wins at the end.

I can be testosterophobic. The male testosterone can be very boring and annoying and repetitive.

Can people finally tell that the real rapist is in the background of that final scene, watching the beating?
Now it’s very clear that the only person who’s not damaged at the end of the movie is the aggressor, yeah.

What did people think? 
Some people said, “Ah, it’s your best movie ever!” Others said, “No, I liked the original version because it has a hopeful note at the end.” The same story, the same events, the same dialogue, but the way you identify with the characters is radically different. It’s very interesting to watch both movies. If I had tried to produce or release the chronological version, it’s so dark that no one would have financed it even with the movie stars that I got to do it.

You’re getting some of the best reviews of your career with Vortex.
Truly, a very bad sign. With many directors, their movies that won the Oscars and got all these awards and total positive critical response, like five years later, everybody has forgotten those movies. But I understand why many more people like this. It’s because the subject is very close to a problem that most have to deal with, especially people who are over 40, 50 years old.

I don’t know. When people scream or are pissed off, I enjoy it. Bad reviews, like the really bad reviews, are very enjoyable. Some of them you want to make posters and put them on the wall, so when you wake up in the morning, you know who your enemies are and what you’re fighting for. Also now you can find a photo of anybody just by their name. So you have a review by someone, half of it’s like a whole page of insults coming from an abstract name and then you see the photo of the journalist with a bow tie and a cheap smile, and say, “Of course. We don’t belong to the same family.” So seeing the photo or watching a video of the person who wrote the article makes you laugh.

What was your favorite bad review in the past?
Oh, I had a few good ones for Irreversible. Like, “the new Marquis de Sade has arrived” or stupidities of that kind. Or calling me a “Nazi homophobe” or whatever. I think when people are offended by a movie; it’s funny because it makes you think that people still believe in cinema. I know that my father gets upset when I have bad reviews because he comes from a generation in which they really believe in the printed press. There was one very bad review for Love in Argentina in a leftist newspaper, for which my dad was working on sending drawings. “How can this guy who works in the same newspaper where I do my drawings be so hateful against you?” I say, “Dad! Come! Find me the address. We’ll go and spit on his face! Let’s go together!” [Laughs.]

In the case of Vortex, maybe the fact that one of the characters is a film critic has also made critics look warmly on the film.
But do you notice something cruel about the movie? It’s almost like a joke. At the very end of the movie, when the apartment gets emptied, you see his essay, called Psyche, it’s on the ground. It’s ready to go to the garbage can. What’s supposed to be the testament of his life is just going to the garbage can.

That is probably personal for you, too, because anyone who creates something and tries to put it out in the world surely fears that it will be discarded or completely forgotten.
It’s happened very quickly. I think most of the directors of the ’60s and ’70s that died in the last 15 years didn’t expect that today no one can watch their movies. There are directors who’ve made like 60 movies and there’s not one on DVD and not one that is rescreened in a cinematheque or whatever. The truth is that there are technological developments that made the work of many cinema creators disappear. Cinema ages very quickly, and it can disappear very quickly because of the ways it was distributed. Even if you do a 4K transfer and you put it on a DCP, to open a DCP, you need a code that comes from the lab, but all the movie labs are going bankrupt. You now have movies on hard disc that cannot be opened because there’s no one to give you the key number to open the DCP. Most of the movies that have ever been shot and distributed are already disappearing.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.