Love: Interview with Gaspar Noé

Love
Love

Seen at Cannes 2015

Format: Cinema

Director: Gaspar Noé

Writer: Gaspar Noé

Cast: Aomi Muyock, Karl Glusman, Klara Kristin

France 2015

135 mins

Cannes 2015 Coverage

One of the most talked about films at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Gaspar Noé’s latest offering is a labour of love, in every sense of the word. Noé’s first feature since Enter the Void (2009), the drama takes intimacy to a graphic third dimension, chronicling the sexual and drug ventures of an American who falls in love in Paris. But even if Noé is pushing the envelope in a similar vein as he did with his previous films, Love (3D) is more sensual experience than exploitation.

Pamela Jahn caught up with the Argentine director right after the film’s premiere to talk sex, Salò and pubic hair.

Pamela Jahn: Has the response so far been as you’d expected?

Gaspar Noé: I don’t know. I haven’t read many reviews yet. And actually, I fell asleep while watching the movie. I woke up when the credits came on, so the only response I had was from the people at the afterparty.

It’s the first time you shot in 3D, but it’s used in a quite subtle way throughout, apart from a couple of scenes.
Yeah, I didn’t want to do ‘pop-out’ all the time. There are only two, or maybe three moments, where you see things pop out from the image, mostly penises or the hand of the girl. I think the reason why I wanted to make the film in 3D is mostly because it looks a bit more real when you see the images on the big screen, or even on a smaller screen. There is some kind of vulnerability in those images that makes them more touching or emotional in 3D.

Was it difficult to get the actors to do exactly what you wanted them to do?
No, not at all. One day though, Karl Glusman was worried when we were shooting the scene with the transvestite. He asked me, ‘Where are the limits with that scene?’ And I said, ‘There are no limits.’ Actually, I knew that nothing would happen, but he didn’t know what I would ask him to do, so he was afraid. But when he realised what was going on, he started laughing. It was the funniest shooting day ever.

You found both actresses in nightclubs. What exactly where you looking for in terms of their characters?
Klara was just dancing, but she was dancing extremely well. But it didn’t need to be a club. I also quite often stop boys or girls in the subway or on the street, to ask them if they would be interested in playing a supporting role in a movie, and I take their number. I never talk about the main character because then people get overexcited, but once you make the first contact, all you have to do is film them with your phone or a small video camera to see how they look on screen. And I did a test with Klara and Aomi and they were both great. So then I had to introduce them to the guys who would potentially play the main character. At that point, I was still considering three or four guys, but I also thought that Karl was by far the best choice, and the girls agreed.

In the film, Karl plays a young film director and the posters on his walls seem to reference your personal taste in cinema. How autobiographical is his character?
It’s not autobiographical, it’s just the kind of people I know… or, let’s say, a mix of me and many different guys that I know. Even if his cinematic taste might be similar to mine, his behaviour is totally not. And mostly he is in his own mind anyway. He talks shit about women, but in a way, you don’t know what most people think, why they don’t talk.

Do you feel Love is maybe a bit more conventional than your previous films?
Maturity! I’m getting to a maturity zone… [laughs]

Oh, really?
No, it’s just… if you want to commit a new crime, make it different to the previous one. I’m not going to redo any of my previous films. And actually, shooting in 3D was a new game for me, plus I was always talking about making a film with lots of sex scenes and here it is. I dreamt for years of watchching a movie of this kind, where sexuality is portrayed as it is in life and not as it is in adult videos or what they call ‘erotic cinema’ these days. Because actually, erotic cinema has disappeared, it was a genre in the 70s that really existed and now it’s nothing – there’s erotic photography but no erotic cinema. But also, I would still not call it a conventional film. For me, the way sex is portrayed is very banal or close to life in a good, healthy way, yet it’s not conventional… but maybe less intentional.

Was it a conscious decision by you that the girls would keep their pubic hair?
It’s sensual, I wanted the movie to be vintage. Personally, I really don’t get aroused at all by girls who shave their pussy, and I wanted the women to be attractive on screen. At one point I was considering a very pretty young porn actress from the States to play the part of Aomi, but the issue was that she was shaving and it would have taken too long for her to let it grow again. We even thought about maybe sticking some fake hair on her, but it was very messy, so finally I decided it wouldn’t work. Also, the lack of pubic hair reminds me of adult videos, or what people call pornography, because now in modern porn images the girls are always shaving. But also, that even shocked me when I watched La vie d’Adèle, because at one point her girlfriend is painting her and you see she has no pubic hair and I thought it didn’t fit with her character. She is supposed to be very natural, almost like a country girl, and seeing her shaved just looks more like a porn image to me.

What do you make of adult cinema today?
I don’t know, I lost track. I haven’t watched porn since I was 25. I liked the movies from the 70s like Defiance (by Armand Weston), or the French pornography from the 70s like Jeux de langues by Francis Leroi. For me are they were arousing, much more than those Californian videos with girls who look like firemen or soldiers with tattoos. But also, your sexual interest changes during your lifetime. I remember when I was 20, I would get very excited watching two girls having sex together, and nowadays I feel it can be good and that’s it, I don’t get aroused. But maybe that’s because I have less testosterone than when I was 18 or 20.

Are there any boundaries in cinema that you wouldn’t cross?
I don’t know, because when you say that I don’t know which boundaries I could think of. Irreversible always comes second or third place in a list of the most violent films ever, amongst A Serbian Film and Pasolini’s Salò;. But even Salò , for example, is a clean movie. As long as not everything is fake and the message is right… Salò might be hardcore to watch, but it’s also a very clever movie, a useful movie.

This interview is part of our Cannes 2015 coverage.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Watch the trailer:

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night: Interview with Ana Lily Amirpour

Girl
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 May 2015

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: Ana Lily Amirpour

Writer: Ana Lily Amirpour

Cast: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Moshan Marno, Dominic Rains

Iran, USA 2014

100 mins

After enchanting festival audiences around the world, Iranian-American filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour’s acclaimed debut feature A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night finally comes to UK screens. Shot in gorgeous black and white, this Farsi-language tale about a chador-wearing skateboarding vampire drifting in the desperate world of Bad City creates a seductive, singular world out of an eclectic mix of influences that include comics, David Lynch and Italian Western music.

Virginie Sélavy talked to Amirpour at the London Film Festival in October 2014, where they discussed places of the mind, the magic of music and the loneliness of humans.

Virginie Sélavy: You’ve described your film as an Iranian vampire Western. The first two elements are fairly clear, but in what way do you see it as a Western?

Ana Lily Amirpour: I think it’s definitely the music that was such a defining characteristic. The musical spine throughout the whole film was Federale’s awesome Ennio Morricone-esque music. I think there is that slow-cooking construction that a Western does as well, but it’s more the music.

Why did you choose to shoot in America but in the Farsi language?

I don’t think a film is the real world, a film is a world of the mind of a person. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is supposedly in LA, but it’s the LA of his mind. So I think this is a dark fairy tale and it’s a place of my mind. I’m part Iranian and part American and born in England, and it’s like a soup of so many things. What’s so awesome about the film is that it doesn’t have any loyalty to the real world and it doesn’t have to. It’s like a dream, it’s just consistent to itself.

You grew up in California.

I had my period there, yeah. [laughs]

So where did you spend most of your childhood and adolescence?

I think where you have your puberty and period is a big part of it. I was in Miami before that, but I was just a kid. When I hit puberty I was in Bakersfield, in California – there’s this redneck desert, farming, malls, I was going to a mall, I wore short cowboy boots, and there’s also all the Mexican gangs, and all the Mexican girls that I was mixed up with because I was brown, the cholas, the gang girls with lipstick, they’d push me and all that [laughs].

It’s interesting that you grew up in America and that the Iranian part of your identity is a place of the mind for you.

It’s a weird thing about Iranian culture. We’re one of those cultures like Italian or Jewish, we have very strong families, aggressively imposing families, in an awesome way. So I always had my Iranian-ness in that way, my grand-mother and my aunt and everybody, and the dinners and the noises and everything. But I never had the place itself. There was a weird thing that happened when I made this film. It became this imaginary limbo. I felt like I was making my own country in a way. Here’s the rules, and here’s the citizens, and now is the place and everyone can come and visit, and if you like it, stay… Other people in the film were similar. Arash [Marandi] was in Germany, his family lived there, and Dominic [Rains] went to Texas and Sheila [Vand] was born in California, very similar to me. I think everybody liked how it was like getting to have a place that was Iranian. Because even when I went to Iran I didn’t feel like it was my country… It’s something else. But I am Iranian. What am I? [laughs]

I liked the chador for the vampire because it’s very visual, but it’s also very interesting because it is a piece of clothing that has become a symbol for the oppression of women and in your film it becomes a superhero cape.

And a brilliant disguise. No one is going to expect it from her. For me it was just because I put one on – I had one as a prop in a movie and put it on for the first time. It felt like a stingray, I instantly felt like a creature. It moves, and it’s made of a different kind of fabric, it’s very soft and it catches the wind, and it’s beautiful. And I just felt like a badass. And then I thought, this would be an Iranian vampire, this is it, it’s this girl. And the whole idea for the film started with this character. I don’t even like black in my movies. But it’s black and I just pictured it against white, and so it had to be a black and white movie. And the whole thing about whether, like you said, it’s something that symbolizes oppression for women, I think somebody who is Muslim maybe wouldn’t feel that way. You feel that way because that’s what you are bringing. I do like flipping the script, but it’s about something else. In this world, with all these people and all these countries and all these places, we come up with systems on how to exist as people, the clothes people wear, the bumper stickers on the cars, saying ‘This is who I am’, ‘This is what I believe’. But with all of us, if you start peeling it back like an onion there’s weird, weirdo, weird shit inside all of us. And if you get into the inside, and see the weird shit, usually it calls to question the system that’s on the outside, and that’s what I find interesting.

I like the fact that there’s so little dialogue in the film.

It’s weird because I noticed that I have an aversion to it, and yet I talk a lot. When I was a kid my dad called me ‘Chatterbox’, and I had that New Year’s resolution many years to talk less and listen more, and then there’s this stuff, which is really self-indulgent. I love Sergio Leone and I love David Lynch, and I feel they do similar things with the soundscape and the sound design and the music. If you really think of it as a character in itself you have to create space for it. In Once upon a Time in the West Leone was playing that music when Claudia Cardinale was coming on the train in that sequence when she arrives in town. He had that epic piece already made and he was playing it for her to move to the music, so if you make films that way you’re thinking of it like a character and you make space for it. I also love Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue, I could listen to it all the time, and Woody Allen’s films, they talk all the time, it’s a different thing, it works well, but not in my own films so far. Actors were like, ‘I want to fucking say some lines,’ because they want to talk, they don’t want to just stand there. But what you don’t realise is that the less you’re saying the more you’re saying.

THe lack of dialogue makes the film more powerful. In the case of Sheila Vand in particular, if she was talking more, she would be less menacing.

She was always such a creature. I’m very close with her. She’s hypnotic, I can just stare at her face, stare at her eyes, infinitely. And there’s a sadness and a lonely, aching dissatisfaction to her that I find extremely charming and beautiful and self-destructive. The biggest thing was that, it’s supernatural, it’s not human, and she is a human, so my only concern was, ‘you’re a creature, no matter what, at all times, in all scenes’. So we were watching cobra videos on YouTube, and they follow your hand and imitate the movement, and looking at the tension of it too because they can strike fast.

The film seems to have a very melancholy view of human relationships, and it seems to show how those two isolated characters slowly learn to trust each other. Is that what you wanted to put in the film?

That’s my favourite part, when you say stuff like that, it’s the most interesting time for me. I love what people say about the film. My relationship to my film is like my relationship to my reflection in the mirror, like how others look at you. Yeah I have loneliness, and being a person is so singular and lonely in a way, fundamentally. And also when you’re making stuff you go even more into your little mind tunnels. I think I just want magic and meaningful connections and intimacy and it’s so hard, and life can be so automated. And it’s terrifying. That’s why I love music because it’s that and it’s instantly that. And it’s really special when it happens with other people because that’s really rare. But music does give me this feeling of freedom and comfort.

For that lovely scene of the first intimate moment between Arash and The Girl, when he comes up behind her in her room as she plays a record, you chose ‘Death’ by White Lies. Why that particular song?

It’s a really great song. I heard it when I was living in Germany the year before I made the film. It has this vintage nostalgia, it’s a new song but it has this feeling of synth-pop from the 80s. It just felt like the feeling of falling in love but in an adolescent way, it has a high school love feeling, it’s this innocent John Hughes kind of feeling. That’s what they are to me, those two. Because it’s so dumb in a way to fall in love, it’s two people who have no clue who each other are, so it’s that dumb, sweet, nostalgic love.

Why the title?

It’s so weird because I made a short film that was called A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, it was five minutes long, in black and white. It was after I put that chador on and I thought of that character. I thought it’d be so cool to have her in a park and some man starts following her, through the streets, into a building and then into an apartment, and then right when he enters into the apartment she turns around and eats him. I was telling Sina [Sayyah], my producer, and I was explaining ‘and there’s this girl, and she walks home alone at night’, and then I was, ‘that’s it, that’s the title’.

The secondary characters are very interesting, there is something very rich about them. This is particularly true of Atti, the prostitute, because it is hinted that there are many things in her past, and it feels like she could be the main character of another film.

I feel like that about all of them, they are all the main characters in their own films. And they all had extremely detailed back stories, every single one of them. Atti watched her mother kill her father when she was 14 years old. She has a very intense and long story that ended her the way she is. But she is also a pragmatic, sensible, tough type of hero. I feel like it’s hard to ruffle her feathers. I love the pimp so much too, he is a fetish of mine.

Why?

The character was based on Ninja from Die Antwoord, the South African rap-rave duo. I’m a huge fan and I love Ninja, and I modelled Saeed a lot after him. I knew he was going to be this scary gangster because he looks so intense, so I made Dominic watch Friends because Saeed loves the show and Russ is his favourite character, and six weeks after the shooting he was still watching Friends. It was just to bring it down and make it sweet because it’s impossible, if you look like that you’re going to be taken a certain way.

The two women characters, the Girl and Atti, seem to know more than the male characters, they seem more aware of the forces that move them, whereas the male characters seem more confused about what is happening around them.

Yeah, I would say that’s interesting. The girls are cleverer. I read one time that the men seem more open and vulnerable, and the women are more closed-up and hard to read. I think both are astute observations. I feel that they’re also lonely. It was the one common thing that they all had, stages of it becoming crusty, a loneliness that becomes so stiff it’s really difficult to change.

The soundtrack to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is available from Death Waltz.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Watch the trailer:

Spring: Interview with Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead

Spring1
Spring

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 May 2015

Distributor: Metrodome

Directors: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead

Writer: Justin Benson

Cast: Lou Taylor Pucci, Nadia Hilker

Italy, USA 2014

109 mins

Following their well-received 2012 debut Resolution, co-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have crafted a romantic monster tale in Spring, mixing elements of horror and science fiction to explore love and relationships. The story centres on Evan, a young American who runs away to Italy after a bereavement. In a beautiful seaside town, he meets the seductive, free-spirited Louise and falls helplessly in love. But he will soon come to realise that Louise is hiding a dark secret.

Virginie Sélavy talked to Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead at the London Film Festival in October 2014 where they discussed stem cells, new monsters and romantic inexperience.

Virginie Sélavy: Spring is part romance, part horror, part science fiction, and it’s very obvious that you made an effort to avoid genre clichés. Why was it important for you to have horror and science fiction elements in a romantic love story?

Justin Benson: I know this is going to sound like a cop-out answer but in the writing process we never discussed the genre it came in. At the very basic level there was the desire to make a monster movie but there’s something fun and rebellious in making a new monster. It’s so ingrained in writers and storytellers to use the same half-dozen or so monsters and mythologies that no one even attempts it. And as far as her mythology and the system by which her body works, the whole thing was trying to create a monster that has an emotional resonance like Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an exploration of sexual repression in Victorian society, or Frankenstein is about fear of science. And if you really think about it you can’t separate the monster component of our movie from the emotional component.

What is your monster about for you?

JB: It’s a little more surface level than metaphorical. She quite literally uses men to regenerate herself. She’s survived for 2,000 years by just sleeping with men and you don’t see that in cinema very often. She’s still a normal girl, but for self-preservation she’s willing to continuously sleep with people without emotional attachment. Thematically the movie is about the idea of rebirth, and that’s something we tried to photograph as well with all the insects and nature shots.

Aaron Moorhead: I think also every time she does that is a rejection of eternal love. And the stopping of the monster is the acceptance of eternal love, so accepting the complications and making sacrifices is what that represents, and the monster going away represents love as something more than just chemical.

Louise is an inexplicable, random, sometimes frightening creature governed by irrational forces. Was this also about women and their unpredictable nature with their strange bodily transformations?

JB: It was but that’s actually a low-hanging fruit in terms of representations or metaphors because every monster story is about that. The hope is that, as audience members who are not monsters, you highly identify with the situation because we’ve all been with someone where you wonder, ‘who is this person actually?’ and you also see yourself as a monster sometimes in relationships. And that’s something that’s been explored through countless films. I hope we did it as effectively as we can do it. However that’s a pretty well-tread path of symbolism.

You make great effort to anchor your story in the natural world and to give a scientific, rather than supernatural, explanation to your monster. Why was that important for you?

JB: For me it’s just that anything that is pure supernatural is less scary. Because there’s the idea that maybe something like Louise could actually exist in the world, without it being beyond the five senses, and that’s a terrifying idea. Our first movie plays with that a little, it’s a bit more metaphysical. In a lot of horror movies, there’s a point at which somebody set up the five rules of the monster, you can look at it, when you run it runs, things like that, and it’s completely arbitrary. In this case there’s just one singular idea and all the rules expand from that because it follows scientifically.

AM: The other interesting thing about it is that at any given time when a monster mythology is invented it’s over time that we start to accept it even though it doesn’t entirely make sense. For example at the time Frankenstein was written sewing a bunch of dead people’s body parts together and reviving it with electricity was almost plausible, today we don’t believe it. But now we know that stem cells basically provide you with immortality, so if one could metabolise stem cells it would follow that they would provide immortality. So if you’re going to develop a new monster it does make sense that you’re going to use something that makes sense from a modern perspective, whether it’s spiritual or scientific.

Justin, you said in the Q&A that you went to medical school.

JB: We made this a year before I went to medical school. I wouldn’t say it has a direct influence on my storytelling outside the fact that I was raised by parents who think very scientifically and I had scientific training. My mind works like that, I always want empirical evidence for things. But as far as my formal medical training goes, I read this article in Time magazine.

There is a strong connection between Louise and nature through all the insert shots of bugs. What was the thinking behind that?

JB: I think in many ways because she’s a freak of nature, she’s very singular, she’s got such a strange and powerful body, it would follow that she’s skipped a few steps of evolution. And so you might also see that if someone can control things outside of themselves like pheromones, or affect them in some way and connect with the world, that would follow from further evolution. It’s not quite so nailed down as that, it’s more like a mutation of some sort, but it seems to make sense that someone who has that kind of ability may also have the ability in very light ways to influence what else is happening around her.

There are a lot of aerial shots of the town and coast as well as close-ups on bugs and the monster’s animal body parts. It seems that you wanted to inscribe your story both in the large scale and the small scale of the world. Is that fair to say?

AM: We decided very early on when we were shooting this movie that, in addition to the small, personal cinema vérité stuff, there would always be these highly subjective shots, whether that be a camera panning off of them to something else the camera might find interesting, suggesting something like a presence or force, literally God’s eye view shots, anything we could do to visually communicate something bigger than them that’s possibly even outside their own belief systems. But not having them talk about it, always suggesting it photographically.

JB: One of the biggest ideas and biggest images of the movie is the comparison between the beautiful and the grotesque. And that’s constantly happening, with the bugs and all of that in beautiful Italy. But the idea is, if you’re making a horror movie that is set in an incredibly beautiful location – most of them take place in creaky old houses or a forest, places that are inherently scary – so if your location isn’t inherently scary how do you get that mood, how do you get the mood of something wrong? And so if we didn’t do that we just have a beautiful location with this other little thing happening, but nothing really feels wrong around it, and there is a sense of wrongness about the story. And that’s able to give us our more unsettling landscape without having to go down a familiar horror movie trail.

Why did you choose to film in Pompeii?

JB: We actually shot at a volcanic excavation site that was very similar to Pompeii but not exactly Pompeii because logistically we couldn’t do it. But the reason why it’s there in the story was that we wanted her to be at least 2,000 years old so she would have seen the transition between gods, which is something I’ve never quite seen in a character. Even in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles they tend to be about 500 years old, and when they speak of things like God and their place in the universe they speak about a very Judeo-Christian God. And what I find so interesting about Louise is that she’s literally seen gods change, and how she would view spirituality given that. As far as it being Pompeii, it was a historical reference point for that region that most audiences would just know and it wouldn’t need much explanation. On top of that, in her own mythology, because of the casts at Pompeii, the moment she would see the cast of her love has a lot of emotional impact. She can go there and stare at the exact moment of death of her parents. And that’s something not only creepy but with a lot of emotional impact. And also she’s had to live through lava, which would be a horrifying painful event that would probably, none of us want to die, but she would probably have an even greater aversion to it given her experiences.

The film is an exploration of love and romance, and it seems almost as if you were working things out for yourself in the characters’ dialogue. When you were asked about love and relationships in the Q&A you said that you didn’t know much about romance. Isn’t that a little disingenuous?

JB: No, it’s true. I would be worried if someone watched that movie and was like, oh I’m going to learn about love or romance from this. The only things I know about romance and love are literally from my friends. I don’t have any personal experience of being in love but I have lots of friends who are in relationships and I speak to them about relationships. Aaron has real relationships, I can talk to him about that. And that’s really where a lot of stuff in this story comes from. And on top of that, as far as women go, I know my mum well, I have some amazing female friends. So far they’ve expressed they like her character and that means a lot. No one has said ‘you’re such a sexist’ yet.

It feels like she’s a fantasy, not a real person. Do you feel you’re still working out what you think relationships are?

JB: I guess so. And in that way it is entirely fictional. I’m inventing an idea of something I don’t know anything about. But it’s cool that people identify with it and like it.

I believe you are now working on an Aleister Crowley film. What angle are you going to take on this?

JB: When you look at everything we’ve done, if you want to put some adjectives on it, it’s weird and mythic, quietly mythic. That is Aleister Crowley. He’s someone that people will immediately identify as being that guy who’s into the supernatural and the occult, but his idea of the supernatural and the occult is something so esoteric that there is no normal path to telling the Aleister Crowley story. You have to break a lot of rules to tell a story, and so you have to take new paths of storytelling and it has to be weird and it has to be mythic.

AM: And that honours the good parts of his memory. There’s plenty of bad parts so we don’t worship this guy in any way, we find him to be a very complicated and flawed and fascinating human being.

JB: And if someone were trying to simplify it into being about a demon they’d be incorrect. If you look at Aleister Crowley and you call him a Satanist, you’re incorrect. He’s not. He doesn’t believe in Satan. What he believes is very complicated. He’s not a great person but it connects with everything we’ve done very nicely.

AM: Right now we don’t have the desire to expand our scope into a full-on biopic, we will eventually, but right now we just want to keep telling a very small personal story about relationships, and this one is more about his relationship with his own ego. But there’s also a lot of people around him that he destroys, builds up and destroys again. So our story takes place in the pressure cooker of one week really early on in his life where he’s performing a ritual to purify himself. That’s the framework of it. What’s really happening is that he’s a man with a bunch of really good ideas but with absolutely no sense of moderation, and he makes these choices that lead him to become what history remembers as ‘the wickedest man in the world’. That’s our take on it, it’s a very small film with a really big idea and a gigantic character.

JB: If you want to simplify it he’s like Tyler Durden from Fight Club meets Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Watch the trailer: