You stated in an issue of Mad Movies about The Bird with the Crystal Plumage : “His works are both highly deliberate and reckless. They surpass most other horror films, depicting dreams where there are no more barriers.” This is something that can be compared to your own filmmaking. If we take the example of Irreversible (2002), it is indeed a rape and revenge film , but we see that it is more than that.

"In films, it's good to try to get closer to the language of dreams. There are a few directors, like David Lynch or Cronenberg, who have tried to achieve this. I like it when the director embraces their role as a shaman and takes you somewhere else. 99% of the films we see in theaters or on TV are narratives told with the same syntax, the same makeup, the same type of dialogue, the same editing… I never watch TV series because I find them boring. When I get on a plane, I check out all the latest movies I haven't seen. I even try to catch up on Marvel movies, but after ten minutes I switch over! Indeed, I can confirm that you absolutely shouldn't have gone to see them in theaters, as Scorsese said. (laughs ) Sometimes, there's a guy who invents a new language, who manages to immerse you in a story, and for an hour and a half or two hours, you completely forget you're in a movie theater. It's amazing, that's what true hypnotic trance is. It exists in cinema, but not everyone is gifted at creating it. Argento, you have entire passages in his films that are truly hypnotic. Sometimes, the most visual directors aren't always the strongest with dialogue, and vice versa. You have people like Sacha Guitry, whose films I'm not really familiar with, who is driven by dialogue. Jean Renoir, he's driven by dialogue. With Godard, it's not the dialogue that takes precedence. I feel closer to Godard or Kubrick when he makes 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In a three-hour film, there's almost no dialogue. It's the images and sounds that tell the story of the film. It's the same with Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977). If you add up all the dialogue in David Lynch's first film, there must be only a few minutes of dialogue in, I think, two hours of film. (laughs)" GN

Speaking of Martin Scorsese, when I saw Vortex I thought a lot about The Irishman , it's also a twilight film about old age, regrets of the present time and the emptiness of existence.

"I really like The Irishman . It's the story of two power-hungry psychopaths, ready to resort to sadism. And these same people, at the end of their lives, when they begin to decline physically and intellectually, due to the degeneration of their brain cells, end up receiving the same treatment as people who behaved like lambs their whole lives. When you see Robert De Niro's character ending his life in a nursing home, among many other people who have lost their minds and who behaved well their entire lives, you realize that old age, in a way, flattens everything, both the best and the worst, into a homogenous mess." GN

Let's get back to Dario Argento, is it true that he gave you advice on editing the first scenes of Irreversible?

"No. Actually, I invited him over during the editing of Irreversible because he was passing through Paris. At the time, we were already friends, and I'd also met Asia [Argento, his daughter] in the meantime. Asia told him she'd run into me and seen some footage from Irreversible . I asked him if he wanted to see some footage too. And I showed him the beginning of the film. He said, "Wow, you're going to be in trouble like Friedkin was when he made Cruising (1980)!" I told him, "  Don't worry, don't worry..." (Laughs) Indeed, I didn't have any problems afterward. He saw the whole film later. But I just wanted to show him some footage; it was an excuse to have lunch with him, so he went to the editing room just before the meal. He is so friendly and so funny that, since I have known him, I love having lunch, dinner, coffee or a drink with him… The fact that I offered him the role in Vortex was a pretext to spend time talking about cinema with him." GN

Let's return to this obsession with color you mentioned earlier. Regarding I STAND ALONE , you told Philippe Rouyer—who also makes an appearance in Vortex — "I favored gray, brown, muted colors, more in keeping with the sadness of the story ." ("Gaspar Noé. Une mise en scène ludique." Positif, March 1999, pg. 29). These are hues that we also find in Vortex .

"Yes, but those are also the colors of Paris. In Paris, the walls are gray and cream. There's some red, but I didn't overdo it in this film. It's mostly creams and grays. Also, the very colorful aspect of Irreversible ,  Enter The Void , or Climax (2015) was linked to nightclubs, to the clothing of a young generation that wants to be modern, so it worked well with the story. Here, it would have been a bit out of place. People of that age don't dress in neon colors; it seemed natural to me. The colors of Paris that are so prevalent in this film are indeed closer to those of I Stand Alone . The two films are similar in another way : in fact, when I made I Stand Alone , the character played by Philippe Nahon was thirty years older than me. I'd already made a film where the main character was older, but he was more or less an alter ego of me. Here too, Dario Argento, even though he's a film critic and not a director, is a bit of another alter ego of mine. I imagine that maybe in twenty-five or thirty years, I'll be exactly like his character." GN

This relationship with the city is interesting. During the promotion of Enter the Void , you said about Tokyo that if you have existential problems, you can very quickly be overwhelmed. At the beginning of Vortex , the ailing mother played by Françoise Lebrun gets lost in Paris.

"When you're with people who are losing their minds, you really get that fear. Having experienced that kind of situation myself, as my mother lost her mind at the end of her life, it's a constant state of paranoia. You have to remember to lock the door properly because if the front door isn't locked, your mother can walk out and you don't know which corner she's turned. It's very human, and also very hard for people to find their way back. My mother, who lost her mind even though she was incredibly intelligent, it was just the degeneration linked to high blood pressure and age. I remember being with her and my father, and we were embarrassed because she was yelling at the taxi driver, saying, "No, you're not going there, you're trying to rob us, take us home!" I kept saying, "Mom , he's turning onto the street that goes straight to the house." But it was no use! She didn't recognize the street or the walls, even though it was the right road . Then your mother became suspicious of you; she thought I was in cahoots with the taxi driver and that we were trying to take her somewhere else. You find yourself in some truly bizarre situations. You can't know what's going on in someone's head, but it's paranoia on a whole other level." GN

There's this moment in the film where the woman perceives her husband as a stranger she's afraid of. What's more, she's with him in this apartment that feels alive and organic, with all its belongings, etc. We really feel her terror, as if we ourselves were inside the mind of someone with Alzheimer's.

"There are a few films that accurately portray this state. The Father (Florian Zeller, 2021), for example, achieved this in a very artificial and theatrical way. It's quite educational in terms of how someone with Alzheimer's perceives the world. The situation was completely reversed. Everything is filmed in an external and detached manner. When a character enters the scene, whether it's the young nurse or someone else, you never know who is who because they switched actors for the sequences. When someone has Alzheimer's, they don't know who they're talking to. My mother, for instance, used to mistake me for my father. I would tell her no, "He 's your husband," pointing to my father, "  I'm your son ." She would say, "  Stop making fun of me!  " Also, in The Father , when the character saw someone, he called them by other people's names. You think to yourself, what is he seeing? It's quite unsettling how The Father really puts you in a state of confusion that's very close to that of someone with Alzheimer's. You also see this in Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1984). Suddenly, you no longer know what reality is around you, or when things shifted. It happens in dreams : you know the character in your dream is Paul, but he has Pierre's face. And you wake up in the morning having dreamt of Paul, but with the face of Pierre, another friend of yours. In these films, you have inversions of dialogue, faces, and so on. I have the impression that age-related dementia causes a lot of perceptual distortion of this kind. You're in one setting, then you feel like you're in another. You're watching TV, then you get the feeling that the person on TV is talking to you." GN

We absolutely have to talk about split-screen . We're thinking of the first dialogue scene between Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg at the beginning of Lux Aeterna (2019). At one point, Béatrice moves closer to Charlotte and passes her hand into the frame. We see this in Vortex when Argento gestures towards Françoise Lebrun.

"The moment Dario reached his hand into the other frame, I didn't ask him to do that at all. I also didn't ask Françoise to cry; she started crying of her own accord. And Dario, seeing Françoise cry, became worried about her. So he reached out. It wasn't intentional on my part; I was simply observing what was happening in front of the two cameras. I was behind one frame, and Benoît Debie, the cinematographer, was behind the other. At the end of the shoot, I had only seen my own frame. It was the next day, when I was editing the two images together—mine on the left and Benoît's on the right—that I saw what had visually occurred on the split screen . It was really beautiful and unintentional. Often when you're shooting sequences, accidents happen. Jean Eustache said that no matter how many times you shoot a take, three times or eight times, you ultimately keep the one where there was an accident."" GN

During our last meeting at PIFFF in December 2021, we discussed the link between split-screen and the representation of parapsychological abilities – with the prom scene in Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) in mind. Before we were interrupted, you were thinking about the superimposition of parallel universes. Can we continue this discussion?

"It's said that the right and left hemispheres process the same reality differently. Your final perception is a blend of how these two hemispheres perceive it. I don't know if it affects one hemisphere more when the image you see is on the right or the left. But when you see a Cinemascope image with two frames inside at a 1:20 aspect ratio—so two frames make 2:40, the width of Cinemascope—your eyes are constantly scanning the screen from right to left. In post-traumatic stress therapy, they say that to remove trauma from someone who's been in a war or anything like that, they have them constantly move their eyes from right to left to shift the memories from one side to the other. When you're making a two-hour film, where your eyes are constantly scanning from right to left, it puts you in a particular mental state. You're putting together a puzzle similar to shifting memories. It's not magic or anything, but it involves a different kind of mental processing than the simpler analysis of a central image where your eyes aren't constantly scanning the screen. Does it make the two hours go by faster? I think so. If you watch the film on just one screen, it seems longer, but because your eyes are scanning, your brain is very busy. Friends who have seen the film twice told me that the second time, it felt like they were watching a different movie. At times, you become more focused on one of the two screens and try to forget the other. You almost feel like you're seeing the film for the first time." GN

Compared to split screen , there is also this disintegration of the couple which also comes through separation, like a kind of broken mirror.

"In a way , split-screen gives you the impression of seeing two lives that are like intertwined tunnels under the same roof. It's close to how you perceive life. It's a bit like when you're with someone having a meltdown, or someone who's smoked too many joints and is laughing to themselves, and you don't understand. There are plenty of moments in life when you share a space with someone and, at the same time, you don't know what the person is seeing or thinking, or what's going on in their head. I've been with someone who's accusing you of something, and you don't know what it is. You're there for half an hour wondering what the problem is without knowing. You try to guess what's going on in the other person's head; it could be something stupid, or it could be a very valid reason. You can spend half an hour next to someone and feel a hundred thousand miles away from that person even though you are only thirty centimeters or a meter away." GN

Let's conclude with a remark by Pier Paolo Pasolini: "  Death is the dazzling montage of our life, which gives it its meaning." ( "Obsession with the Long Take" (1967), The Heretical Experience, trans. Fr., Payoy, 1976). Does this fit with the theme of Vortex?

"For me, death isn't a subject. Death is the absence of life. The mystery isn't on the side of death, it's on the side of life. What is this temporal perception between one point and another? I find that the little summary by Edgar Allan Poe that Dario Argento repeats in the film, "Life is a dream within a dream ," is pretty close to what little I know of it. The mystery of life remains unsolved. The mystery of death ? There isn't one. (laughs) " GN