Gaspar Noé/Love 3D/Juliette Reitzer
How did the Love project come about ?
"The initial idea was to depict the love life of a 25-year-old film student, with all the excesses linked to partying, alcohol, and other excesses. It also aimed to portray broken vows and promises, because life makes it impossible to keep them. The goal wasn't to make a transgressive film, but rather one that shows the reality of romantic passion. Few films depict sexual passion within a romantic context." GN
Why do you think that is?
"The image of the phallus is still frightening. It has a completely anachronistic and schizophrenic aspect to it, in the internet age where porn is accessible everywhere and to everyone. We live in a society where the representation of violence is far more tolerated than the representation of sexual relations between consenting adults. Yet, when people make love, it releases endorphins and serotonin that make them happy: we should value sexual relations!" GN
You speak of your desire to film romantic passion as it is in reality. Yet your cinema is the opposite of naturalism; it is organic, impressionistic, highly stylized.
"The subjects of my films are organic because they deal with visceral impulses: survival, the desire for reproduction or revenge… Moreover, since I have an artistic background (my father is a painter), perhaps I am formalist in the sense that, for me, the central question is how to approach a subject that has already been explored many times without it resembling a documentary. I adopt formal choices that seem appropriate to the film because they will create a certain type of emotion. For example, a film shot in a single take, like Irreversible , will convey a greater sense of truth. I also like shooting in single takes because it allows the actors to settle into the setting and the situation. For Love, as for Enter the Void , I also shot in a single take, but by doing several takes of the entire action, to give myself the possibility of cutting them in the editing, and recovering the middle of the first take, the beginning of the third, etc." GN
What was the formal approach for Love ?
"The principle is that it consists of 3D stereoscopic shots interspersed with twelve black frames. Shooting in 3D was difficult; it involves large cameras with a lot of adjustments, sometimes with desynchronization problems… When we tried to shoot a shot with a Steadicam to achieve smooth movement, the camera was so heavy that the camera operator quickly became exhausted and started shaking. Most of the time, we therefore placed the camera on a tripod or a crane." GN
Despite these constraints and obstacles, why did you choose to shoot in 3D?
"I've been taking 3D photos for a long time, with a small camera that takes one photo for the left eye and one for the right, which are then placed in a small box to view them together and create a sense of depth—you can see one of these in the film. But above all, I had bought a 3D camera that was commercially available to the general public when my mother was very ill. She died shortly after, and I filmed her extensively with this camera. Watching these images again, I realized that, strangely enough, while being very artificial, they create a greater sense of reality and emotion than 2D images. Then Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity came out. The film greatly impressed me with its use of 3D. I had somewhat abandoned the idea, because Love had a very small budget. But two months before filming was due to start, I submitted an application for funding for new technologies to the CNC, which I received. And so we were able to film in 3D." GN
The direct approach to unsimulated sex in Love is reminiscent of the photographic work of American photographer Nan Goldin, some of whose images are actually visible during a sequence in an art gallery.
"It was a happy coincidence. I asked Agnès B. if I could film in her gallery, and it turned out that at the time of filming, she was hosting a group exhibition with an entire wall of Nan Goldin's photographs. I know her work a little because I love it, and she had liked Irreversible . But it's true that Nan Goldin's photos are among the best I've seen in terms of depicting sex as it is in real life. There's a naturalness to her images that makes them incredibly moving. I also remember Larry Clark's film Tulsa , which was screened during his retrospective at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. We saw his friends shooting up, having sex under a sheet, and I thought to myself that this is something you never see in the cinema." GN
The sex scenes add depth to the love story, and the latter tinges the erotic sequences with melancholy. How did you work with the connections between these two registers?
"Initially, I saw the erotic sequences in isolation during editing, and some seemed exciting to me. But the film begins with the announcement that something bad may have happened to the heroine. Placed in this context, the sex scenes, which individually might seem pleasurable, become melodramatic. They are imbued with the sense of what is to come, with the knowledge that things are going to go wrong. What was meant to be joyful becomes anxiety-inducing. I think that knowing the hero's entire life is going to fall apart prevents the viewer from experiencing that excitement. It's beautiful, but we know it's already fading away." GN
As is often the case in your films, you adopt a fragmented narrative, here by repeatedly shifting between Murphy's present, alone in his apartment, and his past, his love affair with Electra.
"The character reminisces about his past, and when you think about your past, you don't progress chronologically or linearly. In fact, if I wanted to make a film that truly resembled the workings of memory, I would do something even more chaotic, almost haphazard. We shot everything set in the past first, then took a break of almost two months to film the present. Between these two periods of shooting, I saw Nicolas Roeg's *Investigation of a Passion*, in which the transitions between past and present are magnificent, and which inspired me." GN
Murphy is a die-hard film buff. The walls of his apartment are plastered with posters for Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Taxi Driver, The Birth of a Nation … What does he have in common with you?
"There are loads of other posters on his wall, including one for Flesh for Frankenstein , a 3D horror film produced in 1973 by Andy Warhol… Yeah, it's more or less the kind of film I like. And, like me, the guy swears by 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's kind of a self-parody. Unlike Murphy, I'm not 6'5", I'm not American, and there are loads of stupid things he says or does that I might have thought about at some point but never actually did. Let's just say he's a loser who's like me, or rather, he's me, but a loser version. He's always saying he's going to make films, but in reality, he doesn't do much. At no point in the film do you see him do anything other than pull out his little video camera to film his girlfriend in their bedroom. In any case, I didn't make him a hero or anyone glorious. But all the characters in my films are losers, and that's also what makes them relatable." GN
Similarly, Electra is a painter, but since she's been in a relationship, she doesn't paint much anymore… Is love necessarily alienating, destructive?
"No, I don't think so. Murphy and Electra dream of art, but they're not really living a concrete life, and what's also destroying their relationship is drug use. I have enough friends who have been through it or are still going through it to know that cocaine destroys relationships. Alcohol too." GN
Aomi Muyock is sublime in the role of Electra. Who is she, and how did you meet her?
"Aomi is Swiss-Italian. She used to be a model, but she stopped, and now she writes. Like Klara Kristin, she had never acted in a film. But generally, I don't focus on whether people are actors or not; I sense their charisma. On
Enter the Void, for example, the actor who plays the best friend had never acted before. For Love , whenever I saw a girl who, in terms of energy or looks, seemed suitable, I took her number. I had met Aomi at a party, asked some friends for her number, and told her I was interested, but she didn't want to do the film. Even though we assumed she wasn't going to, we got to know each other. And eight months later, when I got into the thick of pre-production, she came back. She devours the film, she devours the screen; she's both incredibly touching and sublime. This ties in with the fact that Murphy's obsession is Electra. And her slightly shaky, smoker's voice adds to her depth." GN
You're often described as a cult and provocative filmmaker. Do you feel you occupy a special place in the French film landscape?
"Lots of people want to make films that are outside the mainstream, but it's difficult. There are people who make a great first film, but can't seem to follow it up… I was lucky, because Irreversible was a commercial success; so I was able to shoot
Enter the Void, which I was more obsessed with, but it didn't do well, even though some people appreciated its cinematic merit. Sometimes you have to force your way in. I made it on a shoestring budget, lying to my bankers, to the lab… That said, I don't compare myself to my friends, to people of my generation, but rather to the films I love, to what excites me about other directors. When I saw Gravity, I thought, "Hey, I could do something with 3D." When I saw Alain Cavalier's Le Paradis, which manages to evoke emotion by filming objects, it made me want to film objects myself. They were actually very present in the script for Love, a little less so in the film itself, because we had very little time to shoot." GN
After filming in France ( Seul contre tous, Irréversible, Love ), Japan ( Enter the Void ), and Cuba (for the anthology film 7 jours à La Havane , in 2012), do you think you'll ever film in Argentina, your country of origin?
"I have a connection to Argentina because of my childhood and my father, but it's not a country I dream of discovering: I already know it. Today, if I were given the choice between filming in Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, or New York, I would choose Kinshasa. A change of scenery awakens parts of your brain that places you already know don't." GN