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Enter the Void

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : A drug dealer's ghost (Nathaniel Brown) experiences a bizarre and voyeuristic journey through the afterlife as he wanders through Tokyo.

Opens September 24, 2010

Runtime:2 hr. 41

Interview with Director Gaspar Noe

(Q): Did shooting in Japan enhance the strangeness and the mystical and void-like quality that you were trying to reach?
 
(Gasper Noe): No, actually. The thing about Japan is the energy is so strong and also the fact that if you take a very different language in the mouth of the people that you meet in the streets who don’t speak English. To have the two characters. There’s something dramatic to be in a country that doesn’t care about you and you feel like the country doesn’t give a shit. If we shot in France of America it would have been much less dramatic.
 
(Q): And part of what was dramatic about your film is that sort of notion. You have on the one hand the Buddhist notion of life is an illusion or that life is the only thing that changes is change, or the only thing that doesn’t change is change. And the idea here was life is cheap, the way the Japanese seem to regard the Westerners as life is cheap.
 
(Gasper Noe): What happened in the movie would never happen. It could have happened in some other countries but not in Japan, but I needed some drama to start the movie. It was originally that he would jump from the window but then it would have reminded me too much of the first scene, which a guy falls from the roof of a building. I think the movie has that thing because at the end of the movie you don’t know if his memories were not an illusion. When he comes back to life to understand that the whole mental state that you were going through actually was just a dream. All that in the movie is just an illusion but you can think that even his whole life is an illusion before that.
 
(Q): Well that’s the whole concept in Buddhism; illusion and what’s real, what’s not real. Your film sort of raises that question, especially now as you answer the question you even more highlight it in one sense or another by suggesting that maybe the entire film is a dream. Not really him reliving it but that it could be all his illusion as he’s dying.
 
(Gasper Noe): And also the truth is that you don’t know at the end of the movie. You can’t tell anymore what’s real. But in the case of his dream at the end of the movie you don’t know if he’s not going to simply just wake up in a hospital and be sent to prison, or you cannot tell if he died or not. It’s making a dream out of all the elements that he went through. He read “The Book of the Dead” and he promised to ever leave her, and he decided to reincarnate.
 
(Q): Some of your other films have equated sex and violence. This film, although there are elements of that, this film also has, at least at the end where you show the flip sides, sex becomes a resurrection or reincarnation or redemption. Is that what you were trying to show in terms of your own evolution and in the evolution of the film?
 
(Gasper Noe): There is no reincarnation because at the end he comes back through his mother’s belly and we don’t know if he’s going back into the loop and he’s coming back to life through his mother’s belly or if he’s not just remembering or reconstructing a false memory of the most traumatic moment of his life, which is the moment he discovered his life for the first time. I don’t know if there is any redemption in heterosexual love here but you see a woman and a man making love.
 
(Q): What I saw is interesting in the film. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Wilhelm Reich; have you ever read any Wilhelm Reich? He’s a radical psychologist that posited that sexuality and sex was the most important release of energy.
 
(Gasper Noe): He constructed a machine didn’t he?
 
(Q): Yeah, the “orgone box” [“orgone accumulators”].
 
(Gasper Noe): I read about him but I never read his books.
 
(Q): This is a movie where you’re dealing with more about sexuality and maybe positive energy release as well as negative energy release, and you’re looking at both sides of it in this movie. Do you feel that in a way you were conveying that message with the negative and the positive of the energy release of sex?
 
(Gasper Noe): I don’t believe in good and evil, I don’t believe in positive and negative energy. There is an energy of life or course that fights for the survival of the species, so whatever keeps you alive is good for the survival of the species. There is a meaningful energy which is the sexual energy.
 
(Q): In making this movie did you become more Buddhist or less?
 
(Gasper Noe): No, I’m not Buddhist. I don’t believe in religion; I don’t even believe in the survival of the mind after death. I believe that there are forces and connections between humans in their lifetimes but I don’t think they will ever exist on another dimension.

(Q): The whole idea in Buddhism is the illusion of what is real, what is not real, and that’s why the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” was often connected to people tripping on acid. Both the book and acid raise the question what’s real and what’s not real. Am I really seeing this, am I not really seeing this? Is that also what you were raising was the question of what is reality in a sense?
 
(Gasper Noe): Ask yourself what is present and real, why your own memories get so blurry when you have a blackout or even why you try to remember what you did two weeks ago.
 
(Q): How did you discover the artist that made the city?
 
(Gasper Noe): We created it. When we were in Japan we decided we wanted something a bit like the city of the future, like Las Vegas, and to have some black light colors so we could turn off the lights and we could see the lines like the lines you see in the movie “Tron.”
 
(Q): You could definitely do an exhibition with that work.
 
(Gasper Noe): Yeah, but the problem is we had to bring them to France to recreate them digitally and half of them are in pieces now.
 
(Q): Oh, what a shame. So how many of these drugs have you tried yourself?

(Gasper Noe): I just did my best. I haven’t done much and each time I was doing it for my own knowledge. When I was doing mushrooms I was trying to work on my movie and take notes of how these kinds of things had to be portrayed. So I always played it very careful and I never exposed my mind like some of my friends did.
 
(Q): So how did you manage to get all of those aerial scenes? Were they hard to arrange?
 
(Gasper Noe): The moment we started I quickly stopped any kind of drugs because I had to have all my brain working.
 
(Q): I agree with you. The times I’ve taken psychedelics I need a rest period of the four or five days, and I don’t have the time to do psychedelics again.
 
(Gasper Noe): You doing location scouting and you’re fucked up for one week, so I guess I haven’t done anything strong for the last six years.
 
(Q): But I must say, they’re always memorable those experiences aren’t they?
 
(Gasper Noe): Yeah. Ii did my best to give the feeling of what those experiences are in other people. I know some people liked the movie because it reminded them of their own mushroom or acid trips. But also some people told me they had never done any kind of drugs but they were really happy they saw my movie because now they felt what it was like and they would never ever do it.
 
(Q): Get back to the question about aerial. The whole aerial experience was fascinating. Your style is this gritty, kind of street photography, but the aerial shots couldn’t have been done that way, so how did you do that? Those must have been tough to do because your normal style is a gritty, street, handheld, vérité-ish, and then you’re doing these scenes over the city and that must have been a whole different technical experience.
 
(Gasper Noe): Starting a movie is like starting a game, and first you create the rules of the game and then you play with them. I guess that for some people the last part of the movie is colder than the other parts of the movie because you’re far from the motions of the actors. You don’t see every single detail of their expressions. I could have played maybe more with those concepts.
 
(Q): The most important thing though I think in making this movie work was having Paz, because you had to have somebody with that sexuality and that power to sort of reconnect throughout. Was she the toughest person to get for the film?
 
(Gasper Noe): No, actually I met her almost one year before I met Nathanial and I really liked her and I wanted to have her in the movie. But I had problems, believe it or not, to find someone to play the brother, because I wanted to have some physical resemblance between the brother and the sister. And also I knew that I wanted to avoid a professional actress because as a concept of the movie I knew that if I had a professional actor he would have a vision.
 
(Q): This movie fits into a cannon of films about the experience just before death. There’s that movie that was made by the one director with I think it’s Ryan Gosling in it. Mike Forster directed it; I can’t think of the name. Have you seen any of those?
 
(Gasper Noe): It’s based on a book by a Japanese writer.
 
(Q): Were any of those movies an inspiration or did you try to avoid thinking about them?
 
(Gasper Noe): No I would say my experience. Of course there were other movies that had complex special effects, like “The Matrix,” but in many ways this movie is simpler than those others.
 
(Q): I also saw a lot of science-fiction in this film. Do you think you’re going to be moving more towards science-fictional type films?
 
(Gasper Noe): Actually I’m going to go more to erotic movies. I shot a documentary but I guess I’ll go to a safer place.
 
(Q): Well the other side of the Buddhist thinking is there is that peace or satori or enlightenment, and there’s also the idea of not killing, not damaging life. Do you see yourself moving more in that direction too creatively and conceptually?
 
(Gasper Noe): I know that I wouldn’t want to kill an animal. Even when there’s a cockroach in the kitchen I don’t kill the cockroach.
 
(Q): What are you doing now? Besides having partied hard in New York.
 
(Gasper Noe): The thing that I’m doing more promotion. I guess really I’m going to get into the erotic project.
 
(Q): And will you shoot here in New York?
 
(Gasper Noe): No, I guess I will never go to the States because [the something] are omnipresent there and I would feel more freedom if I shot in an Asian country, or even in France.

End.