Gasper Noe
A deep dive into the neon underworld of Enter the Void
September, 2010
A psychedelic melodrama about a young soul floating in purgatory above Tokyo’s vice dens, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void is one of the most visually stunning and viscerally brutal films of recent times. Shot entirely from the point of view of Oscar, a young drug dealer who gets killed at the start of the film, Noé’s camera flies around the neon city’s tarnished maze of love hotels, strip clubs and crack dens, following his mourning sister, Linda, as she tries to escape her shattered reality.
Like his 2002 film Irreversible, which featured the infamous nine-minute subway rape scene, Noé actively challenges his audience at every turn, alternating between blinding them with strobe lighting, CGI visualisations of DMT hallucinations, and some of the most insane sex scenes ever committed to celluloid.
Written over the past 15 years, Enter the Void is Noé’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a trippy masterpiece that confronts the meaning of life in uncompromising fashion. Here the 46-year-old director talks about the human soul, his own relationship to death, and the power of drugs to open up visions of the after life.
Tim Noakes: Enter the Void is amazing, I loved it. It’s been described as the ‘ultimate death trip’. Are you hoping to make people hallucinate?
Gaspar Noe: It seems to me that people should watch it stoned. In the 70s people would take LSD to go and see 2001: A Space Odyssey or 200 Miles by Frank Zappa, but do you think people should watch this movie on drugs?
No. I think if you watch this movie on drugs, I’m not sure you’d ever come back to reality. Have you ever watched this move on drugs?
No. I knew some people watched Irreversible when high who said they were scared by it. But I’ve never done it. Also, I’m worried I might get bored by my own movie. I wonder what the perception of the movie would be by people who watched it on acid or mushrooms. There have been a lot of comments about how close it is to a drug trip. For example those who have experienced mushrooms or acid said “oh it reminded me of my trips as a teenager and now I want to it try again”. Some other people who never never smoked a joint or took acid said “thank you so much for the movie because now I feel like I’ve had a drug experience and now I know for sure I’d never do a real one”. I think people were control freaks might enjoy a safe experience and I think people who were uncontrolled freaks might enjoy this as a memory of their discontrol.
“Nowadays most kids don’t give a shit about America. They all dream of Japan or Hong Kong.”
Why did you choose to set in Japan rather than Europe or America?
Nowadays the new generation dreams of Japan much more than of any other country. In the 70s kids would dream of New York, or LA or San Francisco or going to Woodstock, but nowadays most kids don’t give a shit about America. They all dream of Japan or Hong Kong. I thought it would be too obvious to locate it in Las Vegas because of the parallels with all the neon and its super surreal environment.
Was it a leap of faith to go to the Far East and shoot a film like this?
Yeah! Las Vegas is a gambling city, a mafia city, the energy is very different, it’s all about money money money but visually it looks like Tron, which I like. That’s what I also like about Tokyo and Hong Kong – the neighbourhoods look like sets from Tron. When you do hallucinogenics like DMT or Ayahuasca, you have lots of visions that are made of very bright landscapes like neon tubes. By choosing a city full of neon lights, you automatically bring a hallucinogenic layer to the story.
“When you do hallucinogenics like DMT or Ayahuasca, you have lots of visions that are made of bright landscapes like neon tubes. By choosing a city like Tokyo full of neon lights, you automatically bring a hallucinogenic layer to the story.”
Was it difficult shooting in Japan — were you free to roam and do what you wanted?
Yeah, but when we were shooting in Tokyo I chose a neighbourhood that is run by the local mafias. There is not just one gang, there are many. We shot most of the movie there, as that was where all the hotels, gambling rooms and massage parlors are. At a point I had to have someone in the crew dealing with these people because they were annoyed and had lost the privacy in the streets. Many people who work there don’t want to see people with cameras, especially a foreign crew with cameras, so you have to negotiate with them.
What were the main barriers you had to overcome to achieve your vision?
I didn’t have any problem with the financiers or the producers. But when you try to do a movie that tries hard to be hallucinogenic you need to work on the visual effects with people who sometimes haven’t done drugs, so you have to explain what it would look like and be full of references. The other thing is that you don’t know how long it is going to take them to do those visuals and by you not knowing how much time and how many computers you need to do those visuals you don’t know how much its going to cost. So at a point you are throwing some people one way or the other way and the company that did all the visual effects could suddenly tell me no that the thing I wanted was not going to be possible. So you don’t know exactly how to make those visions happen on the screen with the amount of time and the amount of technicians that we have. Hopefully I had the very best people from that company working on the movie. They made it look amazing.
“When you try to do a movie that tries hard to be hallucinogenic you need to work on the visual effects with people who sometimes haven’t done drugs, so you have to explain what it would look like.”
How did you actually get down on paper and then film what you saw in your head?
You have a dream and then you try to find the tools that can make that dream take place on a flat screen. I didn’t know how I was going to shoot all the aerial shots before we started working on the pre-production. I thought I could do it with very small tiny hand made cranes in a real location, but actually we had to rebuild all the locations in a studio and use a real crane above. It was more expensive that way but it looks much better than I thought.
So did you actually reconstruct a whole city block?
All the visions you have inside all the interiors, like most of the apartments you see from above, were real locations that were reconstructed in the studio so we could shoot with a crane above. We took all the furniture out of the real location where we filmed the flashbacks and had the same worlds reconstructed in the studio – we put all the furniture inside them and shot from above. Sometimes the actors or the non-professional actors were complaining that I was too far from them and I was playing with my own toy and they felt alone on the set.
How high were you on the crane?
It was always at least 5 feet above the head of the actors. They felt the presence. At the beginning some of the actors would watch the camera and I said, “Please don’t watch it”. They got used to it. You feel the shadow over your head and know where it is.
In a way the camera worked as a device for them to react to the “soul” of Oscar.
Yeah. In a few scenes Paz (de la Huerta) would stare at the camera and I would say, “Hey pansy, you’re staring at the camera” and she’d say “No, not the camera, I’m just thinking of Oscar. I’m staring at his soul”. And actually we kept some of those takes, for example when she is stripping at the club she is staring at the camera. You feel like she is thinking of her brother because she is staring at what you know is the pure soul of his ghost. We had some other shots without her staring at the camera but I thought that was the best thing to do because it feels like she is thinking of him.
“When she is stripping at the club she is staring at the camera. You feel like she’s thinking of her brother because she is staring at what you know is the pure soul of his ghost”
Do you believe humans have souls or is it just a dramatic construct for making a film?
I believe there’s something called a soul that is far more powerful than we think but I think the soul is connected to the flesh. I don’t think the soul can survive the decomposition of the flesh. Once you are dead, your brain breaks down, your memories disappear and life keeps on going without you. You melt with the ground and then your done, but I believe in the soul. If there was no soul how could you take the shape you take while you grow up, but no I don’t believe in all those stories that religions tell you about life after death or a future life where you will be rewarded for everything you did in this life. Those are brainwashing tools that religions built up to control people. That’s why at the end of the movie, I’m not Buddhist at all, I’m an Atheist, but at the end of the movie when you think that the soul reincarnated, you see the face of the mother and you don’t see the face of the sister. It’s a loop that’s starting its life again from the beginning.
What’s the closest you’ve come to death Gaspar?
I’ve avoided a few motorbike accidents. Once I put myself in a very strange situation where I could have been shot, but that was just accidental. I think the closest thing to what I think the experience of dying is like, was doing Ayahuasca, It’s a drink full of DMT you take in the Amazon jungle. At a point you don’t know where the fuck you are, in which world you are, if you’re human or inhuman or if you’re even on a planet. Then your head goes somewhere else where you don’t even remember that you’re breathing or you have a soul or personality, you’re just surrounded by visions, then slowly you come back to the idea that somebody is perceiving those visions, or something is perceiving those visions. Then you remember you have a human form and you remember there is a planet with humans inside, then you don’t know why you’re stuck in time. That’s not an experience close to death but it’s an experience that is very far from your everyday experience of life.
“I think the soul is connected to the flesh. I don’t think the soul can survive the decomposition of the flesh. Once you are dead, your brain breaks down, your memories disappear and life keeps on going without you”
So did your experience with Ayahuasca directly influence Enter the Void? The outer-body experience?
Yeah. I was in my mind but I never came out of my body like it was in the movie, where a bird could see me. I totally forgot that I was living in a world or it had a living film or whatever. Sometimes it happens when you dream. When you wake up in the morning, while you are sleeping you forget we have a human form or even live on a planet. It’s weird how strong dreams are because when you wake up sometimes you’ve killed someone and when you can’t wake up you’ve really felt you’ve killed someone. You feel safer because you know your not going to go to prison because it was a dream. At the same time the feeling of having killed someone is still there and it feels real. They say that when you dream your brain releases natural DMT in small amounts. So for some reason the survival of the species is linked to then need to clean our brains every night of all the events of the previous week. DMT is in your brain to make you dream and make your brain get rid of all those memories.
A lot of people have said that your films are nihilistic. Are you a nihilist?
They are not and I am not. Just to make a movie you have to be hyper optimistic to get into a big movie and try to create a rollercoaster ride like this next movie. If you are nihilistic that means you are kind of pessimistic too, you’d rather sit at home. You need strength to try to make movies; mental strength not physical strength but you have be very optimistic. Also the way the movies are written are very joyful. It’s a joyful experience. So whether the subject matter or the story is sad, the filmmaker is not sad. A pessimistic movie would be where the story is very sad and there is no way out. Movies like Scum and Straw Dogs are not flashy, they’re pessimistic. But in my movie there are too many visual effects to be pessimistic.
“While you are sleeping you forget we have a human form or even live on a planet. It’s weird how strong dreams are because when you wake up sometimes you’ve killed someone and when you can’t wake up you’ve really felt you’ve killed someone. You feel safer because you know you’re not going to go to prison because it was a dream.”
You’ve got the infamous shot of the ejaculating penis at the end. Is that your way of saying everyone is fucked – the characters and the audience. Or is it a joke?
That was supposed to be a serious scene. When I wrote the script I really cared about that scene, I never saw that people would laugh in the audience. It wasn’t supposed to be a joke it was suppose to be like the climax of the whole trip. You get into the testicles of the guy, then the sperm comes out and here we get into another dimension. I don’t know, maybe there is something I missed, when we were doing the special effects I thought it was funny but I didn’t think people would laugh in the audience. I think it is just because people are surprised, when you are surprised you can laugh.
When has that happened to you in real life?
One day it was a very rainy night in Paris and I was in the bus stop and I was all alone and it was raining and it was cold. I was kind of asleep, I closed my eyes then suddenly I felt the presence of someone. I opened my eyes and there was a guy checking the map of the bus next to me and the guy had all his face burnt like Freddie Krueger. I didn’t expect to see the face of somebody so close and certainly not a guy with his face burnt, and the surprise of seeing that, I started laughing. It was all I could do. The emotional shock I just stood up and escaped because the shame of laughing. Things that make you laugh are often things that surprise you.
At the press screening someone at the back said, “Thank God” when it ended. There was a palpable sense of relief in his voice. Do you see cinema as a way of pushing what people view as entertainment?
In life some people like getting drunk, some people don’t like getting drunk. Some people haven’t even tried alcohol, some people have tried all kinds of drugs. Film critics are paid; their job is to go to see movies and comment them, write about them. Certainly amongst the viewers, in press screenings or even in the normal ones there are many people who don’t like losing their perception of real life. So if you are put in a rollercoaster that doesn’t fit with your normal desires, for sure the longer the movie is, the more they will dislike the experience. I really hate all those 3D animation movies – just the idea of going to one is torture. But I went to see Toy Story 3 and I even cried at the end, but mostly if I go to see those movies I feel like I’ve been in a jail for 90 minutes. So for somebody who doesn’t naturally like this kind of experience the fact that it’s 2 and a half hours is going to be even more painful.
Text © Tim Noakes / Follow me on Twitter
