What has changed since the version shown at Cannes?

"Initially, we didn't think the film would be shown at Cannes at all. We had announced that we weren't ready, but some organizers saw a work-in-progress version and liked it, so we wanted to present it as a work-in-progress first. The film wasn't finished: I had done the color grading myself on my computer, it was longer, and we didn't yet have the final music. But we were told that presenting it as a work-in-progress would be detrimental to the film. So since then, I've worked on the film for six months, on the visual effects, the color grading, the processing, the image doubling effects, the lighting. And then, we redid the entire soundtrack and remade the opening credits. The first time the film was shown in a final version was at Sundance." GN

How was he received there?

"In the United States? Very well. They were all talking about Avatar, saying it was like Avatar, but for adults. (laughs) No, really, I think it was a good thing that the film was shown to them shortly after Avatar. You know, when you show a film at Cannes, people often go there to settle scores, or for the pleasure of booing certain films, basically to kill their friends. And then I also think the film speaks more to the Anglo-Saxon audience, which has more of this drug culture in general, in England, in the United States, where people often tell me about their experiences on mushrooms, on LSD… The idea of ​​making the film in English came from the fact that I wanted to immerse as many people as possible; reading subtitles isn't great for immersion, and English allowed me to reach more people. A French version is in the works. It's like with Avatar, when you're in it, subtitles ruin everything." GN

Would you have liked to make Enter The Void in 3D?

"We didn't have the resources, but maybe for my next film, yes. It's true that subjective vision and 3D go well together. However, the problem with 3D is that I never feel like I have true depth of field, but rather a shallow depth of field. I was in the Czech Republic recently, and there was a demonstration of Panasonic 3D televisions, with glasses. So yes, there is 3D, but it's not very deep. I had a few projects, and the people who financed Enter the Void told me that if I wanted to make my next films in 3D, the budget would increase, but that at the same time, they were looking for programs for upcoming television shows." GN

3D sex could be a completely new cinematic experience…

"No, there have been a few. But often, they are films in green and red or blue and red. I did have a project for an erotic film in 3D, but it will also depend on the equipment. I haven't seen the camera yet, but if it's too heavy, I'll stick to two-dimensional." GN

What was your biggest technical challenge on Enter The Void?

"I was very dependent on the visual effects team, because while you can manage if the director of photography or the sound engineer isn't there, in this case I couldn't do without them, and they did a masterful job. For example, all those shots of the city, half filmed from a helicopter, half in 3D, where every time the camera goes through a circle, all that, I would have been incapable of doing it myself. Then, technically, what seemed the most complicated was the first-person perspective scene in front of the mirror, with the character's hands moving in front of their eyes. Other shots that were difficult to film were those of the baby breastfeeding. On paper, you write it down, and it seems easy, but in fact, it's not at all. Because you take a baby and an actress, and you think the baby is going to breastfeed, but as soon as it sees a woman who isn't its mother, it starts screaming. So, we..." They spent entire days trying to get those takes right, and even putting his real mother's milk on the actress's breast didn't work. The only shot we managed to get was once the baby had fallen asleep. We positioned him and woke him up just before the take, but within seconds, he would start crying again." GN

Regarding the writing of the screenplay, how did you conceive of the chronological structure?

"The film is very conceptual; it comes from an idea I had a long time ago. The script evolved a lot. Initially, it was a film shot from a first-person perspective, where we saw someone getting high on a joint, and then, after his accident, we followed him through his hallucinations, his mental perception of his past and present. At first, I wanted to keep these perceptions with the character in the frame, certainly, but never at the center, but then I realized that it worked well too. Then there are the astral visions, which are always above the characters. We tried shooting from a lower point of view, but it didn't give the impression of a ghost observing the scene, so we kept the floating effect from a high vantage point. As for the script… it's not very complicated. It's less convoluted than Mulholland Drive, Jacob's Ladder, or 21 Grams. At one point, I thought it would take a lot Furthermore, I wanted to deconstruct the flashback sections, because memories are never chronological; we think of one moment in our lives, which then leads to another, and so on, sometimes repeating itself, sometimes not. But, well, since the film was very difficult to produce because it deals with drugs and sex, because it had to be filmed in Japan, and because there were a lot of visual effects, it was a big risk for the producers. Adding a more complex narrative structure would have driven them away for good. Afterwards, it's not out of the question that I'll make an alternate cut for the DVD, a bit like Michel Gondry did for The Science of Sleep; he added all the unedited scenes to the DVD, and it was almost like a second film." GN

Do you think there will be distribution difficulties, for example, regarding the venues that will host it?

"No, well, I don't think they'll release it like a James Bond film, but the film itself is quite strange. It takes up themes like Trainspotting, only it's much less funny. People have also told me that it's more anxiety-inducing than Irreversible, although less violent. People in the UGC circuits liked it a lot anyway." GN

You are moving further and further away from traditional cinematic grammar…

"It's just that we're tired of traditional syntax. Films from the '50s and '60s were even more interesting from that perspective than those of today. Films of that era, shot in long takes or medium shots, gradually transformed into shot/reverse shot and close-ups so that people could more easily follow the narrative on a small television screen. So, as soon as there was dialogue, we ended up with reverse shots of the actors' mouths, but why not film their hands, or their feet? Anything more interesting than people's mouths, really. Godard, for example, had a lot of fun with language. In the end, everyone knows why they make films. If we can't surprise ourselves, there's no point. I don't have a speech or a message to convey to anyone. If I did, maybe I'd write a book, but if I I make films to play with their language. People tell me I invent things, but no, I don't invent anything. It's like making a salad; all the ingredients are already there. It all comes down to the choices you make to create your salad." GN

Have you always wanted to make this film in Tokyo?

"I've always dreamed of spending a lot of time in Tokyo. In fact, Cyrille (the actor who plays Alex) is going to move there. The first few times I went to Japan, I thought to myself that I wanted to spend time there, and how do you do that when you're a filmmaker? Well, you make a film in Tokyo. But in the original script, it was New York. Then I thought about Paris, but that would have meant the film would have been released with subtitles in other countries, and I wanted to avoid that for the sake of the wider audience. Once I found the Japanese co-production company, I felt confident telling the producers that we could film in Tokyo. Ten years ago, when you asked people what it was like to film in Japan, they told you it was hell because the Japanese executive production, although very passionate, had codes of respect and hierarchy that we weren't familiar with and that could affect our..." It was unfair. For example, it was impossible to tell someone they'd done a bad job in front of others. You had to take them aside, explain things calmly, and so on. We had a bilingual team, and it went very well in that respect. The Japanese really give their all to their work. For example, when we started filming, which was supposed to last three months, I was told it would be good if the crew had a day off during the week… which means that's not always the case. Many feature films there are made in two or three weeks, seven days a week, 16 hours a day." GN

Hallucinatory trips seem very personal. How did you choose which images to show the viewer?

"Actually, I watched a lot of experimental films, music videos, and looked at websites. I wanted to see images made by people who had taken mushrooms, drugs… and after a while, I created a catalog of pictorial and cinematic references, and from there, I recomposed according to my needs. I even looked at images of unusual underwater life forms, with vivid colors. After that, I don't know the programs the visual effects team used to create the film's images, but we worked collaboratively; I gave feedback, and so on. We didn't work with storyboards, but with feedback: they would show me a take, I would say what worked and what didn't, and so on. The most abstract passages were the most difficult to visualize: the initial trips at the beginning of the film, or the vortices every time we pass through a shaft of light… we had to avoid the clichés that are inherent to this kind of concept. With this kind of "In terms of abstraction, it's quite difficult to describe everything on paper, so the only solution was to observe the evolution of the design. For the first mandala, we used Lapis, a magnificent experimental film by James Whitney (editor's note: a short film dating from 1966), as a reference." GN

How did you discover the Tibetan Book of the Dead?

"When I was 18, I read a lot of those books about life after death, astral projection, and all that… there's actually a very good summary of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in a book by Alexandre David-Néel, Immortality and Reincarnation, and it was this summary that made me want to read the real book. So the film is somewhat inspired by that: from the moment the hero dies, we adopt a bit of the structure of the spirit's journey described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In the book, it also says that 49 days pass between death and reincarnation. I wasn't really textbook-like in that respect; I didn't count the days. I simply respected the number of wells of light described, and the moment when the spirit chooses to leave the intermediate zone between life and death (where no communication is possible with the living), choosing a couple about to create life, and one of whom is a light Yellow emanates, to represent fertilization. It can also be animals, and we even considered putting dogs having sex in the film; it could have been funny, but we thought we'd go crazy trying to film a couple of dogs. We thought about making male and female dogs in 3D, but we ultimately abandoned the idea. In any case, the film doesn't depict someone's journey to reincarnation; it depicts the dream of someone who has read a book on reincarnation and is dying. In fact, we don't really know if he dies; perhaps he's imagining it all, even his memories. And at the end of the film, during the birthing scene, we see the mother's face, which isn't the one we were expecting, and then he sees himself and his parents on a plane. In the end, his astral journey is completely dysfunctional, just like his reincarnation.'' GN

When you watch the film again now, does it resemble what you may have seen or experienced?

"Let's just say I did quite a bit of research on my own, but real hallucinogenic experiences are much more chaotic than that. The sequences are much shorter; sometimes you can focus on a memory, but then you'll drift into total abstraction, then you'll have verbal concepts, with four voices speaking to you at the same time. In fact, I had the idea of ​​using a disjointed voice-over throughout the film, and it's not out of the question that I might include it in a DVD edition someday. In any case, my hallucinogenic experiences (which I stopped before I started making the film; doing both at the same time isn't possible) were much more verbal, and you can guide them a bit, for example, by confronting your fears rather than burying them and thus allowing them to grow. Another example: I went to Peru a long time ago, and I spent some time in the jungle with the Shibipo. And there, I found myself in a context "I was in the middle of the jungle, and I drank this magic potion, and I felt like I was in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, flying over entire cities. It was very strange, because the drink, which had lasted six hours, gave me the feeling of a 24-hour trip. If someone ever wanted to make a film about it, the film would have to be 24 hours long, because you really feel like it never ends, your brain is working faster than usual. And then, there's no way to steer your rocket in any direction: you can decide you're going to think of something specific, and then, whoosh, the rocket takes off towards the ground, to the right, or backwards." GN

Are there any films you've seen that made you feel the way you wanted people to feel?

"Yes, when I was 17 or 18, I saw The Outer Limits by Ken Russell, which actually made me want to explore the work of Carlos Castaneda. That said, Christophe Bourseiller wrote a book about Castaneda's life, which is even more mind-blowing than his books. Apart from that, when I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in the cinema, I loved it more than my parents. It was shown in theaters every year, and every time I asked my parents to take me, and every time I felt like I'd had a flash, like I'd entered another dimension… and even more so at the end of the film, which really resonated with me." GN

Regarding the music, how did you approach it?

"I had asked Thomas Bangalter to do the music, but in the end he only did some sound effects. To be fair, he was in Los Angeles working with Daft Punk on Tron: Legacy, so he didn't have much time. But otherwise, we borrowed quite a bit of music, sometimes even layering several tracks from different albums. Among our references, we had Jean-Claude Éloy, for example, who gave us permission to use his music in the film. The soundtrack of a film is decided during editing, rarely before. I even considered using Born To Be Alive for the scene where the character is killed, but it would have been too humorous." GN

You are often described as "controversial" or "provocative". Do you think these adjectives apply to you?

"Well, I'm not very physically strong, so adjectives like dangerous or controversial don't really apply to me, but when I saw people faint in the theater during Irreversible or I Stand Alone, it was gratifying, because you feel like you've done something magical. We make the films we want to see, and maybe Enter the Void is the film I would have wanted to see at 20; besides, the issues in this film are more 'teen' than those in Irreversible. When people ask me who the audience for this film is, I answer that I think it's 15-year-olds who are starting to smoke joints." GN

From a technical point of view, how was the penetration scene filmed?

"Uh… it was very difficult (laughs). No, no, it's 3D. We had as a reference a porn film of which I had managed to get a copy, where they had inserted a folded optical fiber into the actress's vagina. So you could see the guy ejaculate on the lens, but it was in black and white and much dirtier. And then we needed luminous genitals to remain consistent with the Tibetan Book of the Dead." GN

How did you go about choosing the colours?

"Whenever possible, we filmed in sets with neon tubes or in nightclubs. Overall, we mostly tried to avoid blue; in fact, there's a lot more purple, orange, green… We showed the film in Tokyo recently, then we went straight to Hong Kong, and Hong Kong is actually even more mind-blowing, a kind of giant Fantasia, where the music projected in the city is in sync with the synchronized lights of the skyscrapers. If I had to do helicopter shots again, I would go and do them in Hong Kong." GN

You are often considered to be in the same category of directors as Jan Kounen. Like him, would you ever want to make a more traditional film?

"I think for him, making Coco & Igor was a way to surprise himself, after films like 99 Francs. There comes a point when you want to change your frame of reference. The big leap for me was between I Stand Alone and Irreversible, where I went from a film with static shots, tracking shots, and a stable camera, to a film where the camera was constantly moving. Irreversible and Enter the Void are more similar than I Stand Alone and Irreversible. For my next film, I think I'll avoid special effects; I want to go back to a smaller production team. And then, if I make my erotic film, the idea is to arouse the people in the theater. After that, my mother asked me the other day when I'm going to make a children's film (laughs). I'm not there yet, but why not? After all, if I was able to see 2001 as a child, it's because the film was suitable for all audiences. Young people Viewers are more impressionable, but often very intelligent too. The little girl who stars in Enter the Void was fantastic, a real pleasure to work with her." GN

Speaking of your parents, what do they think of your films?

"Oh, they are very open-minded. The paintings you see in the film are actually by my father; he is a painter."

If you were making a children's film, would it be more animation or…?

"No idea, I haven't gotten to that yet. It could be an Anderson story or a film like The Red Balloon… the main thing is not to treat children like idiots. Miyazaki, for example, makes very beautiful films for children that broaden their perception, on the other hand, I can't watch American animated films, Shrek and all that…" GN

Even Pixar?

"I can't. I love Japanese anime, but I can't stand American cartoons. As for a really awesome kids' movie right now, well, there's Avatar." GN

How was Enter The Void received in Japan?

"Well. I was a little worried because they're very concerned about the representation of their culture. Quite a few Japanese people didn't like Lost in Translation, so I asked what they thought of mine, and apart from being told that police officers generally don't carry firearms during routine arrests, it was fine. The film doesn't portray Japan in a bad light; it portrays foreigners in Japan in a bad light. And indeed, when you see this bunch of idiots getting high from morning till night, it's not very glorious… Regarding the filming, we always had to be very precise about our schedules and careful not to go over the allotted time. Outside of Japan, we also filmed in Montreal for the scenes with the children." GN

Were the interior scenes filmed in Japan or not?

"The nightclub and all the sequences where the camera overlooks the scene were filmed in a studio in Japan. We had real apartment sets, so we reused the furniture and recreated the interior for these scenes." GN

When you say you want to make an erotic film, do you want to avoid pornography, or on the contrary, not hesitate to make it?

"People often associate eroticism with something beautiful, as opposed to pornography, which is seen as something dirty. Yet, there are, for example, pornographic comics, notably those by Guido Crepax, that are absolutely beautiful. In my opinion, there hasn't been a truly great pornographic film to date. Sometimes we get good ideas, or good staging, but never a complete film of high quality." GN

Interview conducted by Arkaron on April 22, 2010

https://www.cloneweb.net/rencontre-avec-gaspar-noe-enter-the-void/