Gaspar Noé Talks Maturing For 'Vortex,' Old Age & Split-Screens [Interview]

The cinema of filmmaker Gaspar Noé tends to skew toward the younger, stickier parts of life. Since the name-making controversy of his second feature, “Irreversible” (2002), the Argentinian filmmaker has become synonymous with a world of parties, loud music, drug-taking, and sex. For his seventh film, “Vortex,” we find Noé in a more sober and somber mood. Starring Françoise Lebrun and Italian giallo auteur Dario Argento, and shot almost entirely in split-screen, “Vortex” tells the story of a woman in the late throes of dementia, living in a densely cultivated Parisian apartment with her husband, who is a film critic. Think of it as Noé’s “Amour.“

“I had been thinking for the last five years that I wanted to do a movie with an old couple,” the director says, “and that’s what finally happened. You can easily relate to young kids because we’ve all been young kids, learning language and learning how to make your way in life. But also, it’s very easy to relate to old people because it’s a projection of yourself but a much more fragile version.”

As the film closed out the final official day of the Cannes Film Festival, we spoke to Noé about filming old age, the challenge and possibilities of split-screen, and about the fate that awaits us all.

So many of your films have focused on youth culture: parties, drugs, sex, and so on. What has inspired you to make a film about the later stages of life?
I spent too much time already with young people [laughs]. Why did I spend so much time doing films about characters that are 20 years old? I once did a movie with a character who was thirty years older than me at that time; “I Stand Alone” with Philippe Nahon. I had this idea for “Vortex” a few years ago. It is kind of linked to a situation I kind of lived through with my closest friends or personally with my own family. The movie is not inspired by other movies. I’ve seen films about older couples or similar subjects. But mostly, it is inspired by real life.

Was your own father an inspiration for the character?
He’s 88, but he’s got all his brain; he’s like cleverer than ever. Also, he got Covid last year, but he survived it. No, he’s confined, but the good part about confinement is that people can concentrate on their own work. So he’s painting every day, writing every day. So there are some similarities, but the similarities are mostly that the couple on-screen are a couple of leftist intellectuals. My mother was never a psychiatrist, my father was never a film critic, but when I see the apartment we built for the characters in the movie, it reminds me of the apartments of older friends or even my parents’ house, with all the books and the posters.

All these visual references are reminiscent of the VHS we see at the beginning of “Climax.” Did you choose all these films and books and posters for the set?
I had the chance to work again with Jean Rabasse, the best production designer in France. He did the Polanski movies, he did “The City of Lost Children,” he did “Climax.” He created the whole set in less than one month, and he had the best crew; they rented film books, they rented psychiatry books, and after three or four weeks, the apartment they created looked more real than any real apartment. And it was bizarre that we had to give back the keys at the end of the movie. We had to empty the apartment in three days, and I was already too tired to film it, so we hired a young guy who took photos. In the end, that became the scene that was the favorite of almost every spectator.

The casting is so interesting. Did you always want to have a filmmaker play the lead role, or was it written with Argento in mind?
No, it was Argento in particular, and then I didn’t care if the main character would be an actor or a doctor or a director or whatever; I just wanted to have people that I wanted to film on-screen, and my very first idea was Dario Argento. And my very first idea concerning the female character was Françoise Lebrun, who I admire also. I had seen Argento performing on stage, and he was so so funny. I thought he would be a great comedic actor in front of the camera. I thought it would be good to have a joyful, playful man going through this sad story.

How did you first approach him with the role?
I’m friends with him since the Toronto Film Festival ‘91; I guess he had seen Carne and wanted to produce his own version of Carne. And I’m friends with his daughter Asia. He’s someone that I talk to every year or when I see him in Paris, so he’s a friend from another age that I really enjoy meeting, here and there. He was delayed with a movie because of Covid, and he was free when I started. So I was fortunate that I got to work with him and he invented all his lines and Francios invented all of hers, and Alex invented all of his. The whole movie is very much improvised.

The spit screen is such an interesting innovation. How was it to shoot the whole film in this way?
It was quite difficult because the space was very tiny. And also, because we shot during the pandemic, everybody had to wear a mask. When you wear a mask with the camera, you suffocate because the camera sare quite heavy. And you have an assistant next to you; there were two cameras, plus two assistants, plus the grip, plus the boomer with the mic… So in a very tiny space, we were like 15, at least 8 inside one room. It was so suffocating. So I wished desperately that I could finish the movie, not that there was any tension on the set, just the location and the confinement and the masks. Finishing that film was like coming out of a sauna, in which you spent five weeks.

It’s not the first time you have experimented with the format. How did you come up with the idea of using it in this more conceptual way?
After four days of shooting, I decided to do everything on split-screen. The first days I shot some things with one single camera. And then it became clear that it was more playful to keep the two cameras on all the time. I had to reshoot pieces of scenes that were made just for one camera, or I had to film what the woman was doing while the first camera was shooting what the man was doing. It wasn’t written in the treatment or the synopsis of the film that helped us to raise the money, but it made sense. It became apparent after four days of shooting.

The good thing about editing your film on the computer and not with film stock, like 20 years ago, is that you can try many things in a few minutes. Like you can say, it would be a good idea to switch from black and white to color, or to cut the film in two. And this idea that you did not have ten minutes before, suddenly you try it, and it becomes more important than anything else in the scene. I like playing with the language. There are many directors who play with the language.

There are so few moments when the characters’ worlds truly overlap. The most powerful has The Father reaching over to hold The Mother’s hand. How was it to capture this scene?
I remember exactly the day we shot it; I was very tired. We were getting into the third week of shooting, and I felt exhausted. But the actors already could relate to each other and knew what the characters were made of and where they were heading to. So I positioned the two cameras, and I let them improvise, we did three takes, and they were long takes. I remember I was in the other room; I had the two cameras on tripods, but the mics weren’t working, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying in my headphones, so it was very weird because I had to guess what the discussion was made of. So I discovered that scene only at the editing table, and I cried watching it. I wasn’t aware of how good the scene was until then.

Did the film change how you feel about death?
No. Like the Father’s quote from Edgar Allen Poe, “life is a dream within a dream.” At the very end of the movie, you have this marble grave with photos of them in their twenties. They were young and handsome with a long future ahead, but you know the long future is never long enough; it’s always too short. I put everybody’s year of birth at the beginning of the film, even my own. It means there is a countdown. You know that time is turning, [laughs] it will be finished one day.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.