Four years, two films, and one near-fatal experience after his last feature, writer-director Gaspar Noé has a lot to share. The experimental Argentinian filmmaker – who’s built his career in France over the past 25 years – had a brain hemorrhage in between the 2019 Cannes midnight premiere of “Lux Aeterna,” his assaulting, intellectual 52-minute strobe light thriller about a witch shoot from hell, and the making of his next film “Vortex,” a patient, heartrending, nearly two-and-a-half-hour dementia drama. Needless to say, a lot changed from one film to the next.
After “Lux Aeterna” missed out on U.S. distribution for a myriad of reasons (under 60 minutes, in French, incessant strobing hurts your eyes, pandemic, etc.), Noé got to work on his first feature since 2018’s “Climax.” Of course, no one was expecting a slow-burn like “Vortex,” which seems like it would be of little interest to the man that wrote and directed “Irreversible,” “Enter the Void,” and “I Stand Alone.” But Noé finds a way to tell a gentler, more measured story without sacrificing experimentation in form or his ability to draw out acute emotional reactions.
Now, three years after the “Lux Aeterna” premiere and 10 months after the “Vortex” Cannes premiere, both films are getting US distribution at the same time, sporting quite different, though not opposing, versions of Noé’s craft. Although they do have one very uncommon thing in common: split-screen filmmaking. In “Lux,” the two screens are used to amplify the chaos abounding. In “Vortex,” they’re used to trace the mundanity of the lives of an old married couple. The creative reimagining of the technique from one project to the next is only one example of Noé’s career-long commitment to art over gimmick.
The Playlist sat down with the filmmaker in New York City to talk about split screens, working with Beatrice Dalle, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and giallo maestro Dario Argento, modern blockbusters, his worst on-set experiences and more.
The Playlist: Okay, I want to talk about both “Vortex” and “Lux Aeterna.”
Oh, you saw “Lux Aeterna”?
Yeah, when it premiered a few years ago.
It was funny, because the movie was fully improvised. I had three lines, and we started with that. And then two and a half months later, we’re in the main selection in Cannes, like we have a big feature in the first weekend with all these classy, tall, beautiful models, and it looked like a big event. But it was, like, something that was generated extremely spontaneously.
Even the lighting?
Yeah, the lighting, too. But I work with Benoît Debie, so he’s like a part of my brain. We share the creative process. Sometimes working with some people, it’s like…it’s like being a couple, but you know everything’s going to work. He enjoys working with me, I enjoy working with him, so he says yes and then we can all have fun together. Also, it was great, because I’d never worked with Charlotte Gainsbourg or Beatrice Dalle, and both of them were so sweet and so inventive.
They came up with their own dialogue, right?
Yeah. The same for Dario Argento and the other actors in my new movie “Vortex.” From now on, I think people – especially when you propose to charismatic people, like Dalle, or Gainsbourg, or Françoise Lebrun, or Dario Argento, or Alex Lutz, or even, for example, Karl Glusman, who played in “Love.” I said, “Hey, I’m doing a short film. You wanna come?” And he said, “What’s my part?” And I said, “Eh, I don’t know, just come over and we’ll find it.”
So the day he arrived, in the afternoon, we found his dress and he said, “What am I doing?” and I said, ”You’re going to be playing Karl Glusman trying to do his first feature and being very annoying, and he said, “Okay, I’ll do it!” and he improvised all of it. It was so funny, you know, if you do movies with funny people who are inventive, it will always work. I don’t like working with people who are waiting for me to tell them what to do.
I was gutted by “Vortex,” the experience of slowly watching someone die. It’s very upsetting, but it’s also a lot softer, warmer, and less harsh on the senses.
It’s warm cruelty [laughs].
Were you going for a different kind of abrasion from the start?
It’s like when you give morphine to someone in order to make them die happy [laughs]. Probably my whole life I was hoping to discover what morphine felt like, and I had a brain hemorrhage two years ago. I could’ve died when it happened, or I could’ve died four days later. There’s a 50% chance when people have this that they’ll die, and a 35% chance that you’ll be brain damaged, and a 15% chance you’ll survive without damage. And I’m the lucky guy. It’s like reverse russian roulette. There’s just one chance that you come out without damage from it.
But, the thing is that I discovered morphine there. I spent like three weeks on it. And it felt like a dream within a dream. And they were playing “Gravity” on TV at the hospital, so I saw “Gravity” on a very small screen dubbed into French – the most psychedelic!
On morphine?
On morphine. And I felt like my whole room was turning around. It felt better to be in the capsule of my room watching that movie than for Sandra Bullock to be in her capsule watching the planet. But everything was spinning, and I enjoyed that experience so much, saying, “Oh oh, cinema is great! And probably morphine,” and “‘Gravity’ saved my life!” and then I wanted to come back to this world [laughs]. I really felt like, when I survived that whole process, I really felt like I was Sandra Bullock landing on the planet again. I wanted an ultimate drug experience, a close to near-death experience. I had it, so now I can do more mature scenes [laughs].
Is it strange having “Lux Aeterna” and “Vortex” come out at the same time when they were made in such different periods of your life, pre- and post-hemorrhage?
I insisted! Because I knew that “Vortex” was going to come out here, so I insisted. If the movie “Lux Aeterna” had already been released in many countries – although it’s 52 minutes long – it was in Japan, in Russia, in France, in Germany, in Spain, I said, “How does it come that it was not released either in England or in the States?” And so finally, some distributor bought it and I said, “I’m going to come for the promotional for ‘Vortex’ so please try to release it at the same time.” So, they’re working with the same publicists, everything makes sense. And I like it, because they’re so different that they’re not competing with each other. I’m the director of both, they’re both in CinemaScope. But one is long, the other one is short, one is sad, the other one is funny. So, it’s good.
The conversation continues on the second page.