CultureCritic talks to Gaspar Noé...

Gaspar Noé is most famous for his 2002 film Irreversible. Called a sensation-seeker by some and an auteur genius by others, he is nothing if not controversial. His latest film, Enter the Void, has just been released in the UK, and has been greeted with great critical acclaim. CultureCritic sat down with him recently, and in the process uncovered a fascinating and colourful character...

Where did the idea for Enter the Void come from?

My favourite movie ever is 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I saw when I was seven. It was my first drug trip. I saw it with my parents, and when I came out of the movie I was totally stoned – ‘what was that, what was that tunnel of light, and what was that weird baby with the big head at the end?' The foetus goes through a tunnel before the baby is born, and I was told by my mother that before being a baby I was a foetus inside her belly, and before that, my father put his penis inside her vagina and that's how I came to the world. So maybe I associate the movie with my origins.

Throughout my life I was trying to reproduce the shock I had as a kid watching 2001. I dreamed of doing a movie that would put people in this altered state. When I started smoking marijuana at the age of 13, and then when I did acid at the age of 15, it was because I wanted to go through the tunnel again and be impressed like that, but you never get those images again.

Why did you choose to shoot the film from the point of view of the main character?

When I was 20, I saw The Lady in the Lake while on mushrooms. I thought it would be great if this trippy project that I was thinking about could be seen from the eyes of the main characters, so all the distortions would be linked to their perceptions. I was reading books about out-of-body experiences and I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I didn't know what the movie was going to be about at that point, but I started taking notes. I was obsessed with movies like Easy Rider and Flatliners that deal with hallucinogenic things. I put all the pieces together and thought that I should do a movie about someone who gets shot or has an accident and then [has a] dream about leaving his body. I thought, why don't I alter the structure of the Tibetan Book of the Dead? The trippy part of the movie, him outside his body, could actually have been much longer.

Have you ever had an out-of-body experience?

I tried breathing exercises - only inhaling every three minutes - because I read that doing this could give you an out-of-body experience. Never happened to me. I studied hypnosis, I did all kinds of chemicals while trying to come out of my body but I never could, and I came to the conclusion that you cannot separate the soul from the flesh. I always thought, one day I will make a movie where I put the camera on a crane and that's gonna be my only out-of-body experience ever. I don't know if you've seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but Spielberg never believed that flying saucers existed or that there were aliens that were driving them, but he knew that it was a collective dream that had to be portrayed.

Why did you choose to set the film in Japan?

Originally, it was supposed to be set in France, and then I thought it would be better in English because it could be shown in most countries without subtitles, and subtitles don't work with the point-of-view perspective. I came to London, then New York and finally thought the best place to make this story would be Japan, because it is far trippier and looks like Las Vegas.

How difficult was it to get Enter the Void made?

It was a long process. I was buying experimental music and watching experimental videos, and while working on other projects I kept working on this one. I was convincing people to put money in a movie, saying there would be a few explicit sex scenes, that I didn't want to have famous actors, that I wanted to shoot in Tokyo, that it was going to be very experimental... How can you convince people to put big money [into] that?

What actually helped me was that Irréversible was commercially very successful, so the people who sold that movie abroad ended up financing this one. I don't know if they're going to get their money back now. In the long term I'm sure they will, but in the short term maybe the movie is too distressing to be a commercial hit. The script suggested that the movie would be far more sentimental, but once you add the soundtrack and all the flickering effects... it's really for the people who get stoned.

Why are you drawn to the melodramatic?

Life is melodramatic - I cry very often. If I think about my parents' death, I start crying. Just saying the words, my eyes are full of tears. The more you fall in love with someone, the more afraid of losing that person you become. It's this obsession. You have to be a brainiac and very calculative to be a film director now, but in the end, the mammal aspects of your brain are the ones that are the most universal. If in a movie you have two kids losing their parents, that talks to everybody. I was watching Toy Story 3, and the moment you see all the toys close to being burned and holding hands, I cried. I couldn't believe I was crying watching a 3D cartoon.

Even if you want a movie to be cold and trippy, as 2001: A Space Odyssey can be, the thing that makes it closer to life is the fact that there is some melodrama in it. We all enjoy playing spectators with our fears, and a movie is like a cinematic trance: you want to be scared by seeing things you don't want to happen to you in real life. I never get killed in dreams, but I often kill, and each time I wake up and I feel so sick, thinking, ‘oh shit I am going to prison', and then I'm back in the safe world and feel happy. It's the same when you see a movie that is a bad trip. People say the movie is pessimistic, but it's not. You can say that the filmmaking is optimistic and it also has this optimistic secondary effect. Even with Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom, you think, ‘Woah, that is what torture is, and what fascism can turn into. I'm so lucky that I'm living in a safe country and not living through war'.

I want to ask you about the different versions of the film. You showed a longer version at the London Film Festival, is that right?

There are two versions of the movie. My official version is two hours and 35 minutes long, but I had to sign a contract saying that if it exceeded two hours and 20 minutes I would do a shorter version. 17 minutes are missing from the shorter version, which is a whole segment.

What did you take out?

The missing scenes are mostly some astral visions and the moment the guy wakes up in the morgue and seems to come back to life. The shorter version is not a censored version, because the missing reel doesn't contain any explicit sex or anything shocking, it's mostly just more commercial. I think the people who really enjoyed the short version are going to want to see the long one.

The film is technically quite astonishing. How long did it take you to set up the crane shots?

In the studio we had to rebuild all the real locations that we shot in the flashbacks. We shot from above with a crane and did many different shots because we knew we could not cut the scenes, so we didn't know what we needed for the edit.

Working in Japan is very different from working in the States. People in Japan are so passionate that they can work 12 or 14 hours a day, six days a week. They aren't counting the minutes. The thing I really liked about Japan is that the team were all perfectionists, and for a perfectionist director to have a perfectionist team is the ultimate dream.

This has been a dream project, and, as you say, it has taken some time, so what's next for you?

There's one thing I've been thinking of for many years: I've never seen the ultimate love movie, a love story, a melodrama and a porn movie. When I fall in love I have sex, and most of the time, in real life, sex is hardcore. Why can't you mix love and sex in a movie? In most erotic movies there are no feelings. Since the beginning of the history of cinema, no one has ever come close to what your everyday sexual life is. Why can you not portray sexual love without people saying it's a scandal?

Enter the Void is showing in cinemas now. Click here to read the latest reviews.