Gaspar Noe - Interviews

Interview

Gaspar Noe talks Enter The Void

Can you tell me how the idea of ‘Enter The Void’ came about?

GN: Well, I think in life you have a dream, some people dream of having a family, some people dream of going to Los Angeles and having a swimming pool. Some people dream of whatever… going to war and killing people. In my case I always dreamt of doing a psychedelic movie from the point of view of a guy who is spaced out.

But why from a point-of-view perspective? If we look at Lady in the Lake (1947), or the beginning of Strange Days we know that a POV shot can be quite limited stylistically.

GN: At that time cameras were much heavier than they were in our days, so it was much harder to do a POV shot. Now with all the visual effects and cameras, with film stock that you can push to 800fps, it’s much easier to create a good POV shot. Of course it would be better if we could have shot in 3D, but we didn’t have the money at the time or the tools to do a proper 3D movie. The thing is my first real cinematic experience was watching 2001, A Space Odyssey when I was seven years old, I would also say that it was my first psychedelic experience.

When you were 7 years old?

GN: Sure, watching 2001 A Space Odyssey, right at the very end. I was always desperate to see the lights I’ve seen at the age of seven, so I tried to reproduce what I had seen on the flat screen as a kid, by watching movies such as Altered States, Videodrome, Easy Rider and many other movies containing hallucinogenic scenes. I thought it would be great to have some hallucinatory scenes shot as POV and then the script, I’ve been rewriting the script for many years but production was always delayed. Creating the visual effects for the movie in preproduction are much better now than it would have been five years ago, because now you can create so many thing with computer graphics that look real. For example all the visions of the city that you see from above, and the streets and the cars are all artificial, the streets are animated and the cars don’t exist.

So the film is one of your hallucinatory experiences for over two hours?

GN: Yes essentially it’s a rollercoaster, but it’s more than a movie. I have built a rollercoaster for grown-up people and I want them to believe the game as much as possible. It’s like when you go to an amusement park, sometimes you go on a rollercoaster or you can just play a video game shooting zombies or whatever, then your heart starts beating fast because at some point you believe that the zombies are attacking you. I’ve tried to push limits to play with the spectator more, and make the whole experience feel joyful or playful.

Did you ever think that you might not be able to sustain a movie, solely from a POV of a character, for over two hours?

GN: I knew the script was long, it was 120 pages and I always thought the movie would be above two hours, but I didn’t know if the movie was going to be 2 hours 10 minutes or 2 hours 30 minutes, and actually there are two cuts of Enter The Void. There is one cut that is 2 hours 35 minutes long and one that is 2 hours and 17 minutes long and the only difference is that there is a whole segment that is missing in the shorter version. So for example, in the UK we’ve released the shorter version but twice a week in London you can see the longer version.

Was there ever a time that you thought a film this ambitious, just simply would not work?

GN People were afraid when reading the script, how are the spectators going to understand the camera flying above the characters is the vision of Oscar?  It’s interesting because I myself, have never seen this done in a movie before. Actually we tried to do a voiceover for this and it didn’t work at all, but it’s very evident (that these are Oscar’s visions) now that you see the movie. I was sure it would be clear but the financiers were not as sure was I was. The other question was if you see the flashbacks from the main character, how can you tell that these are his emotions, to this I thought ‘who cares’, we’re in his head so why  would you want to see his face and his eyes? The financiers thoguth the movie would be cold because of this concept but its not at all.  Another element of Enter The Void that surprised me was how sentimental and anguishing the finished movie was, it was far more sentimental than the script. I think this comes from the flickering images and the hushed drones, the original script was somewhere between a puzzle and a fairytale dealing with drugs. The movie is far heavier than the script.

OK, let’s talk about the film itself, and the idea of sensory manipulation?

GN: How did you feel watching the movie?

I definitely felt spaced out, especially within the first 15 minutes. The combination of sound, light and repetition was something that I had to adjust to.

GN: I’m making a movie that will take people on an altered state of consciousness and perception, using the cinematic tools I have in my hand. The sounds, the images - in post-production I added some flicker to the images and out of focus effects to make the images hypnotic, and added hypnotic sounds to try to put the spectator into a brainwave. I like it when people say ‘I felt spaced out’ when watching Enter The Void as that was kind of the goal, to do a safe trip for people, but the movie has far more of a narrative than you would expect and a very structured, very meaningful story.

Did you have an idea of how you wanted Enter The Void to look? Or was this all figured out in post-production.

GN: We had visual references from old experimental movies from the seventies, we also had references from feature films and music videos. When I described what I wanted the POV to look like, I showed them Strange Days, videos from The Prodigy and also two movies by Mathieu Kassovitz, movies where you would see the main character watching himself. Sometimes I didn’t have cinematic or photographic references so I had to show paintings. Also since the beginning I always wanted the movie to look like Tron, because sometimes visions are neon-like. So when were in Japan looking for locations, I said that whatever looks like Tron is good for us, please take photographs and being me there!

After Carne, Seul Contre Tous and Irreversible, I found this movie quite sweet and hopeful, are you softening up as a movie director?

GN: I’m very sentimental in my private life, hyper-sentimental in fact. I cry easily watching movies and my sentimentality is very much attached to females. I’m not cruel, I’m quite playful with the audience, I just think its funny to make movies the extreme way because you know everything is fake. I’m like a magician doing magic tricks if you want, pulling a rabbit out of the magicians hat, and if there is blood on the face of the rabbit then people are going to be even more surprised. Making movies is just doing magic tricks and you want people to scream or cry when they see those magic-tricks.

Enter The Void is released at selected cinemas from Friday 24th September.