Some spoilers below for Climax.
The sangria’s been spiked and everybody’s going nuts. Leave it to Gaspar Noé to take that silly, simple little premise and build an intense, invigorating, terrifying, politically resonant vision of Hell around it. Climax follows a dance troupe over the course of one night as they perform, let loose, go mad, then perform and go mad a little more. Sometimes we can’t tell if the dancers are dancing or losing their minds; often, it doesn’t matter. For Noé, it’s all expressive movement; even the camera crew seems to have become unhinged. Where did this idea come from? What does it all mean? What does his dad, the legendary Argentine artist Luis Felipe Noé, think of it? Does Santa Claus exist? These are just some of the questions we wind up discussing during our chat.
Last year at Cannes, when Climax premiered, you said in a couple of interviews that you were upset that more people didn’t walk out of the film.
No, no, I don’t think I was upset. I expected a much worse response, and they gave me an award for the actors. And then all these magazines that trashed the previous one were saying good things about this one. I think that in some ways Climax is easier to digest than my other movies because the characters are easier to identify with. You love them because they’re young, they’re great dancers, they’re beautiful, and they are willing to construct something. They’re not losers like most of the characters of my previous movies. And in life I’ve met many more losers than winners, but the movie starts with like 23 characters and they look like 23 winners, so you like them. And then the whole collective project falls into pieces.
How did you find these dancers?
I went to a voguing ballroom in December 2017, and that gave me the idea of doing this movie. I convinced my co-producers on Love to finance a documentary with dancers, in trance, with krumpers, voguers, waackers, et cetera. They told me I could shoot it in 15 days for a small sum of money. But when I was one month away from shooting, I decided that no, it was going to be a fiction only. [The Mexican director] Carlos Reygadas once quoted something to me that another director said: “When a movie is good, it’s about the energy. It’s not about the message.†These young dancers are so full of energy and have such a strong desire of living, and they are so talented in their own language that what they portray in the movie is their identities inside a preconceived context that I prepared and that I rewrote with them. It doesn’t happen often, but I’ve been lucky to get the financing for movies for which I had just a two-page synopsis or treatment. Here, my challenge was to put all these people together, with all their energies, coming from different groups. Some of them were extremely gay, some of them were very straight, some of them were foreigners. Some of them had never been to France, like the African dancers.
Was the plan always to depict how this community breaks down?
Yeah. If I make a happy, happy movie one day, I’ll think it’s dull. I like laughing about cruel things because life is cruel. And probably this movie, if it had been filmed by [Michael] Haneke or by [Ingmar] Bergman, it would have been a very dark movie. I cannot keep myself from making it funny. I was reading some books by Michel Houellebecq, and the first thing that comes to mind is that they’re really funny, all the ways they describe the most depressing things. Even the last movie by Lars von Trier [The House That Jack Built] seemed to me extremely playful. But when I talk to some other people they say, “Oh, that movie’s so violent.â€
For me the graphic violence in the movie is just funny. And I enjoy how much he likes playing with the audience. I probably would be very happy with a serious melodrama in which people could cry. I like melodramas. I like crying in life. I like hugging those I love. But some people have an adolescent approach to life, and maybe it’s time for me to change. For example, when I see 2001: A Space Odyssey by Kubrick, there’s nothing adolescent in it. It’s a very mature movie. When I see Dreyer’s movies like Day of Wrath, it’s really mature. If I’m lucky I’ll do one day a very serious drama. But it would certainly be less commercial.
Do you feel like your reputation as a provocateur precedes you?
Why do all English-speaking persons say provocateur? In French. There’s not an English word for it? It sounds like the French have to play the perv in the room. Vincent Cassel is a sweet guy, he’s like the French Tom Cruise, but each time an American movie needs a perv, he plays it. “Oh, let’s go for a French actor to play the perv.†It makes no sense. What was Pasolini? What was Dreyer? There are so many directors that I admire who I thought were just guys with guts. Sam Peckinpah made very violent movies and no one said he was a “provocateur†because he was American, but Straw Dogs is very provocative.
I think people have certainly used the word provocateur to refer to Peckinpah.
I was on the plane and I was watching this movie called Mile 22 or 22 Mile. You see this one? There’s a guy getting slashed every 15 seconds. And it’s a very amusing movie. There’s a lot of graphic violence, but the movie’s not violent at all — the portrayal of violence in cinema doesn’t touch anybody anymore. You watch that like you could watch an old Batman series. It’s playful, it’s funny, and totally out of this world. But when you start touching aspects of the real human experience … Now people are terrorized when they see a man and a woman having sex onscreen. Come on! In real life, having sex with someone you love is the best moment of the week, or of the day (if it’s every day), or of the month. In your own life, you say, “Oh, this is the moment that made me feel good and justified the whole month of work, or the whole week of work.†But when people see a man and a woman kissing and the guy having an erection, then it turns into trauma — like there was the face of the devil coming out onscreen.
It should be the opposite! If there was a movie with a sex maniac having as much sex as people from the CIA and KGB kill each other in that movie Mile 22, then people would say, “Ah, this is the most horrifying movie in the world! It’s sexist, it’s this, it’s that. Men and women — or men and men, women and women — are having sex all the time; they show a dick every 15 seconds!†I don’t see why the imitation of killing is cool and the imitation of love is perceived as evil. Talk about the schizophrenia of the Western world.
Were there specific things in Climax that you thought would upset people, or would make them walk out?
Even if people walk out, they all know a movie is just a movie. So, whether they walk out from Cannibal Holocaust, from Irreversible, or from this, there’s not one single person in the audience that thinks that what was shown onscreen was real. It was just a funny or cruel mutation of life. When you read a Dickens book, you know it’s a novel. And people like going to the cinema. You want to see your own fears onscreen, and sometimes your brain needs to project your fears and desires, and so you dream of your hidden desires or hidden fears during the night, and if you’re lucky you remember them. If you’re not, the brain causes something to send messages to yourself about how you should react in the future. But I think movies like Pasolini’s Salò, or Deliverance, or all those movies that scared me as a teenager were educational. And with [Climax] also, some people say, “Oh, it’s a nightmare,†but it has an unconscious educational effect. The movie is more about alcohol than it is about drugs. And the worst situations I’ve seen among my friends were mostly linked to alcohol. Some people when they’re drunk, they become someone else. They become hyperreptilian, and those people then turn into monsters.
But the alcohol has been spiked, too, right?
Yeah, but slightly. Probably it’s more the placebo effect. You can try yourself. If you go to a party and you pretend that someone spiked your drink and say, “Oh, this drink has been spiked,†everybody will start freaking out around you, and then everybody will start showing the fearful phase that comes with reptilian responses, cruelty, selfishness. So, yeah. I believe that there is an answer in the movie, but sometimes a party doesn’t need much to turn from the delightful phase to the dark phase.
It all seems rather symbolic. You have this very diverse cast. The first big dance happens in front of a giant French flag, and then as things fall apart, things descend into tribalism. The first guy they kick out is a Muslim.
But they don’t kick him out because he’s a Muslim; they kick him out because he did not drink alcohol. The fact is that the first two victims in the movie are the ones who are suspected of having dropped something in the drink. One girl who says she’s pregnant and one guy who says that he doesn’t drink. If I could have added a third character who would have said, “I have liver problems,†he’d have been kicked out, too.
In every country, in every city, when the stress is rising and fear is raining on their heads, people get closer to their own group. The movie is not a fable, but at the same time it is contrary to the American culture of movies like The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure that I used to watch five times in a row as a teenager. In these, the producers and screenwriters made all the bad people die before the end, and most of the good people survived. In real life, it’s the most fragile people who die first, and the strong, resilient ones who survive.
As I watch Climax, I feel like I’m watching a tragedy unfold about the dream of a multicultural, diverse France.
When I did the casting, I didn’t care about the sexual preferences, or the gender, or the skin, or the social background of the dancers, I just picked them because of their charisma and their physical talents. You know, the way they express themselves, it’s incredible. And initially I thought probably the movie would end up looking like another Suspiria with white girls, white boys, but when we started looking for dancers, it was evident that the only ones who really hypnotized me were all these ones that I put onscreen. So, the process of casting was not preconscious. Even the use of the flag was a very last-moment idea because we had a blue fabric, a red fabric, and a gray fabric, and we had to decide which one we were putting behind the stage. We said, “Oh, why don’t we just put the gray one in the middle,†and then [it looked like] the French flag, which made sense. Then the French team won the World Cup. It was fun to see Putin giving the award to this team, this football team that was mostly black. Everybody was happy.
This film does feel more political than your other work.
Is it political? No, it’s just synchronized with some feeling that we all have in the world. I watched Paul Schrader’s First Reformed the other day, and I thought the strongest thing in the movie is when the ecologist tells the priest why he doesn’t want to have a baby and wants an abortion, and he describes what the world is going to be 30 years from now. That is almost like a horror movie. When people ask me in which century I would have liked to be born in, I say I’m very happy that I was born in December ’63, and I’m glad I had a glimpse of what the hippie times were and all these utopias. Because nowadays, someone who’s born in the present world, they are raised with the fear of a big war. And when people are afraid, it doesn’t really make them have wings.
You were born in Argentina. When did you move to France?
I was born in Argentina, and soon after my parents moved to New York. Four years later, they went back to Argentina. Some years later they had to escape for political reasons to France, so I don’t feel attached to any particular nationality. Of course, I feel at home when I’m in Argentina. I feel even more at home when I’m in France. I never felt the need to fight for any flag. You can fight for your ideas, but not for a flag.
What were your first impressions of France?
My father had to escape from Argentina six months earlier than my mother, so he would send me letters every week saying, “Oh, I saw Pasolini’s Salò,†and he would describe it to me. Then he had seen Novecento by Bertolucci and La Grande Bouffe by Marco Ferreri. He was sending me comic books so I could start learning French. I was asking my parents, “What does Paris or France look like?†They knew I was obsessed with cinema; I was watching one movie a day in Argentina. “Oh, there are movie theaters everywhere. And, well, people are not as clean as Argentines. They take a shower sometimes every two days, not every day, and they eat frogs, and some of them eat horses, and there are museums.â€
The moment I arrived, I just adopted the country because there were so many movie theaters. It was like you went to a cheap amusement park and then you got into a bigger one. Also there was this magazine called Hara-Kiri that’s like a very, very anarchist version of Mad Magazine that affected me as a kid. It had the most extreme, sexual, political kind of humor. I felt I had finally arrived to a free world. And nowadays, I feel there’s more freedom of expression in France than elsewhere, as long as you don’t talk about French politics. You can deal with many subjects in cinema or in books that could be shocking in more Christian countries or in other religious societies around the world. That’s why many artists and directors and writers end up moving to Paris. It is becoming more and more like the artistic center of Europe. Whatever Europe’s going to become.
What is Europe going to become?
I don’t know, but I think hippie times are over.
But you were never a hippie.
As a kid I wanted to be a hippie. When they said the French people don’t take showers every day but every two days, I liked it because as a kid I wouldn’t take my showers. And when I was 13, 14, I was listening to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stones, smoking joints, and my parents were leftists, and I wanted to become a hippie. But if you reconsider nowadays the hippie communities, they were not as cool as they were intended to be. Humans are humans, and humans are animals. In every community everybody has a reptilian brain, so the power structures always end up showing up, even with good intentions.
We’re all programmed. We’re all human. And humans are as easy to program as animal species because we all have a religious education, a constitutional education. But there are things that one day are cool, and then ten days later you cannot smoke in the street because it’s evil. I never smoked until five years ago, and then I started smoking. Nowadays in Japan, you cannot smoke in the street, but you can smoke in any bar, any restaurant. And in other countries it’s the opposite. The laws are changing. And people get used to the new laws so quick that it’s scary. All these sex magazines that I loved, that made my childhood and my adolescence — like Playboy, Mayfair, all these magazines that made me want to grow and become a man — nowadays if you want to see a naked woman you have to go to these horrible porn websites, where the portrayal of love is so disgusting that you’d rather go and get a machine gun and join the army.
Did you say “join the army�
And join the army, yeah, because they show you images of the army that are much cleaner than the images of love itself.
Did you fit in, as a child from Argentina?
My name Gaspar has no ethnic connotation. It sounds French, so no one thought I was Argentine; they thought, Gaspar Noé, it sounds very French. So, I felt I was like just another French among French, but with this second side that I felt gave me a superior vision, because I knew that this reality was not the only reality, and I liked being a foreigner. I never felt I was at home in any country. But I never felt like an immigrant.
If I have to fight for one side, yeah, the French freedom of speech is one thing I care about now. You go to any bar to have a glass of wine, a cacao, or a coffee and you get into all these political discussions with Syrian people, Portuguese people, Africans. It’s the cult of the French Revolution — although nowadays it’s more a Victorian society than it was 20 years ago. There is this coffee culture that does not exist in the States. When certain people say, “Oh, I wish I could have seen what Berlin was between the two wars,†I say, “Well, it didn’t last long.†Sometimes a city is great for a decade or two decades, but Paris has really been great for many decades, and I wouldn’t move to any other city of Europe nowadays.
Do you feel France’s attitude toward foreigners has changed, over the years?
I like that it’s more mixed than when I arrived. There are all kind of ethnicities. I think in the rest of the planet, the situation is becoming more tense every day. I just went to Brazil and people are afraid of walking at night in Rio and São Paulo. Like, everybody goes back home at ten in their car. There is more street violence; there is more of everything. But I live in Paris, and Paris is not France. What people call the selfishness of the French, or egomania of the French, I like — because it’s not a country in which first you’re part of the country and then you’re yourself.
I feel like the characters in your films are often very lonely. Even when they’re in groups — in Climax or Irreversible, say — everything fragments and people wind up by themselves. And the films are very internalized.
Can I ask you a question? Do you think it’s not like that in real life?
Is it? I don’t know. You tell me.
I made a movie called Seul Contre Tous, which means “alone against everybody.†[Note: It was released in English as I Stand Alone.] I think life is being alone among everybody. If you’re alone in your perception, you’re alone with your life. Every single moment is created with other people, with interactions — but what you are from the inside is a lonely experience. And there are moments when you dance, when you drink, when you have sex with someone, you feel like your perception of yourself is enlarged through the group, or through a couple — or through a family, with your baby. Those are moments in which you forget the loneliness of the human experience. But inside, you are alone. It’s not sad; it’s just how it goes, from the first day until the last day.
The thing that maybe upsets people about your films is that you take the things that we desire the most in the world — sex, love, childbirth, family, togetherness — and show how they can be poisoned. These are the things that we supposedly want from life, and yet they’re also the things that are the most sensitive when you depict them, or you show them being compromised. The most brutal thing that happens in Climax I think is when the pregnant woman is kicked in the stomach.
She’s not kicked because she’s pregnant; she’s kicked because the other girl thinks she’s lying [about being pregnant], and she’s sure that the pregnant woman is the one that dropped the acid or another drug in the drink. As a viewer you know she’s pregnant, but the girl who kicks her doesn’t.
Even so, that’s a very raw image that’s hard to shake.
There’s an almost identical scene in Seul Contre Tous, I Stand Alone. At a point the butcher is dating a woman, and she’s screaming at him, and he turns crazy and kicks her belly knowing that she’s pregnant. So it was the second time in my movies that the same scene appears. When I finished the film, I said, “Oh, I’ve been using too many of the same tricks,†and this one was to me the most evident one. I did not have any time to write the script, and I said, “Oh, it did work in a previous movie, so it’s going to work again.†The context is different, but the trick is the same. But what I like most about Climax is that [the shoot] happened so fast, and I feel that the characters existed a bit more this time than my very first movie, because I was letting them live. I would be afraid of going to a movie set with a pre-dialogued script like people go to do a theater play, because I’m not good for directing actors. I’m good for putting nonactors in a conflict and mood in which they can express themselves.
But it’s got to be more than a trick. It’s not just about “what’s a convenient narrative thing to happen here?†It’s a very raw, hurtful moment. It must come from somewhere. You must have some kind of fear of something like this to use it again, right?
Fear of paternity. I think because my parents were so loving, if one day I have a kid, I want to be as loving to my kid or my kids as my parents were. It’s a responsibility to reproduce the species. Some other people don’t care. I have so many friends who are not sex maniacs but seduction addicts, who keep fucking around, with condoms, without condoms, and they get girls pregnant. Sometimes they have abortions, sometimes not. And they’re now taking care of kids that they did not deserve with a girl they barely knew. That’s the story of my previous movie Love. They’re stuck in situations where I can see they’re not being a good father or a good mother. Having a family is not a dream for me. But if one day I put myself in such a situation, I want to make my kids as happy as my parents made me.
What does your dad think of your movies?
You know, it’s weird. The last one is his favorite. The one he liked the least is Love. And his other favorite is Enter the Void. My mother died a few years after Enter the Void, and yeah, she liked Irreversible. My mother was bringing me to see movies like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant when I was 10 years old, at the Goethe-Institut in Argentina where they would just play German movies. For me, watching The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant at age 10 was like a very radical experience. I said, “Well, what’s going on? What’s going on with these women?†She said, “These characters are lesbians. Women can love other women.†I said, “Oh, yeah?†“Yeah, they’re a couple, but they don’t love each other.†So, my mother was explaining to me what was a dysfunctional lesbian story. And then when I was 15 she brought me to see Pasolini, and then my father brought me to see Fellini’s Casanova when I was 13. For me it was great that they were bringing me as a kid to see all these movies that were made for an adult audience. If I have a kid one day, I will treat my kid as a young adult. I will try to inform them about all the things that are going to come next. I’m shocked when I have friends who say, “Oh, Santa Claus is coming.†I say, “Hey, don’t turn them stupid. Don’t turn your kid into another little lamb. Say that you’re giving the gifts and that’s all. And don’t tell them that God exists probably somewhere. Don’t tell them that there’s good and evil. Tell them the truth.â€
In the opening scene of Climax, we see these interviews on a TV, and around the TV you have these various books and films and things like that, which I assume are inspirations. One thing I noticed was not there — I didn’t see any musicals.
I don’t like musicals. I like dancing, and I like watching good club dancers. But I’m seriously not attracted to the genre called “musical comedy.†Although I love watching some excerpts of Busby Berkeley’s movies, and I enjoyed All That Jazz when it came out but haven’t seen it since. I liked Grease. I liked watching Travolta dancing in Saturday Night Fever. But if there is a musical comedy coming out in Paris, I’ll never go to see it. Not because of the dancing. The problem with musical comedies is that the dialogue scenes in between are so annoying. It’s like when you watch the Marx Brothers movies — when they’re funny, they’re funny. But in the meantime you have these musical scenes that are annoying. And when I see the Marx Brothers movies I want to cut out all the musical scenes and make a 45-minute movie of each to make it better. But when you see a musical comedy, sometimes the dance scenes are good, but the links in between are boring as hell.
But still, if I go to an Indian restaurant in Paris, they have all these Bollywood movies onscreen, and the female dancers, they do such weird movements with their hands. If I’m with friends and they’re talking, my eyes go to the screen, and I stop talking, and they comment, “Hey, where are you, Gaspar? You’re not listening to us.†It’s because I’m hypnotized by the hand movements of the female dancers from the Bollywood movies.
What about the films of Jacques Demy? Or Christophe Honoré?
Yeah, I like Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. It is very pretty, and I like its visuals more than its music, and the story is very touching. Yeah, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is a great movie. And I also remember that I enjoyed very much the Milos Forman adaptation of Hair when it came out. But not enough to watch it twice. And on the other hand, I watched … what’s the name of the movie with Jennifer Beals?
Flashdance.
Flashdance. I hated the movie, but I thought she was so pretty, so sexy, so perfect, that I had an obsession with her. But I couldn’t stand anybody else talking in the movie. It was the same when I saw Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls. I was hypnotized by Elizabeth Berkley, but in the case of Showgirls, I liked the movie. But yeah, sometimes you’re just an animal with a genetic code and some desires. And for me, the lap-dance scene in Showgirls or some scenes of Jennifer Beals in Flashdance are like the sexiest scenes in Emmanuelle with Sylvia Kristel. They screw up your mind and you don’t stop thinking of that girl for a while.
Did you ever see Sion Sono’s Tokyo Tribe?
Yeah, I really enjoyed it. I think if I had to say which was my last good musical-comedy experience, that’s the one. It’s very playful, very funny, and it’s a very energetic feel-good movie. I’d be happy to watch it twice.
Nowadays, if you want to see good dancing, you go to YouTube, and there are some music videos in which the performers are incredible. But it’s not inside a feature-film context; it’s inside a short music-video context.
So, the internet has been good for dancing and bad for porn.
I don’t know. I never, never got horny watching any explicit sex on a computer or on a cellular phone. I’m old-school. I enjoyed erotic comic books. I enjoyed magazines containing photos from erotic movies or porn movies. I enjoyed watching porn on VHS. But I don’t know if it’s because of the age or what, but when I started watching DVDs I got disconnected from the porn genre, and I started watching documentaries instead. And certainly when you are 14, 15, 16, you are invaded by your testosterone and you need to masturbate three times a day, to fulfill what your hormones ask you to do. But then when you’re 30, you’re more focused and you have less rushes of testosterone and you can concentrate on reading and watching documentaries. But, yeah … I was a masturbation junkie as a teenager. It’s like people when they stop doing heroin they are afraid even of drinking beer, because it’s going to remind them how good the heroin was. I would say the day I stopped my addictions to porn images, I felt like my life was much simpler. I stopped early. I like erotic images, but I don’t like erotic images that are made in a cold context.