Originally printed in Issue 70 - April/May 1999

Paul Duane interviewed French director Gaspar Noé on his recent trip to Dublin where he introduced his new film Seul Contre Tous to a French Film Festival audience.

In 1991 I was at a Dublin Film Festival screening - I forget what the feature was, but it was in the sadly missed old Adelphi, so it must have been a big one - maybe it was Cape Fear - anyway, I haven't forgotten the supporting feature, a French short called Carne, which opened with a long, unflinching take depicting the slaughter of a horse. For real. No special effects. The audience wasn't expecting this. And the film continued to upset their expectations, dealing as it did with a burly, middle-aged horsemeat butcher whose wife has left him to bring up their mildly mentally handicapped daughter by himself. Then his life falls apart. A simple misunderstanding leads him to commit a vicious, racist attack. He goes to jail, and his daughter is put in a home. The film ends with a fairly explicit fantasy sequence depicting his desire to have sex with her. The film shocked me, bothered me, and I've never forgotten it. Still, I wasn't that surprised that its director seemed to have disappeared. Last year, however, he re-emerged with a sort of sequel to Carne. Seul Contre Tous was filmed over a period of eighteen months, shooting at weekends, following a fruitless few years spent trying to raise production finance through the usual routes. It takes up exactly where the first film left off, and follows the un-named butcher through an underworld of poverty, racism, pornography and human degradation, to a devastating and inescapable conclusion. Suddenly the director is being called 'the future of French cinema'. And if the alternative is warmed-over gruel like Sitcom, then tomorrow belongs to Caspar Noé. He was in Dublin to introduce a screening of Carne and Seul Contre Tous to a French Film Festival audience. I find myself looking out for a mean-faced, burly, streetfighting type of guy, kind of Charles Bukowski meets Abel Ferrara. Instead, he's a wiry, impish-looking character wearing a t-shirt with a 1950's space monster on it. He wins me over immediately when he tells me that he's just gone to see a movie and fallen fast asleep. Clearly I won't have to wear my Anti-Pretentious-French-Guy helmet.

Paul Duane: Between Came and Seul Contre Tous, you've spent the best part of a decade with this unpleasant character, did it affect you?

Gaspar Noé: Well, it affected me in the way that, once I decided to do the movie, I got into a lot of problems... it was very hard, financially. So, there's a lot of my anger in the movie, and it's quite healthy to put your anger somewhere else. Also, when you spend all your time editing a movie your first friend becomes the man on the screen of your Avid system. My parents would ask, 'Who are you seeing now?' and I'd say, 'Oh, I'm just meeting the butcher every day - for hours...' I'm glad I'm rid of the butcher... I really like the actor, but the character in the movie, I wouldn't like to spend one day with him, anywhere. He's a pain in the ass. But as long as he's behind a screen, he's just a character that I'm controlling.

PD: The movie has a strange plot structure, with no real story development as such, apart from the moment when he finds the gun - things just happen.

GN: I wanted the narrative to be...headless, no, that's not the word...without a target. The story is about a man being lost, so mostly it fits what he's going through.

PD: Isn't the end of Seul Contre Tous simply a repeat of Carne's ending?

GN: When I wrote the first version, it was going to be a feature version of Carne. After it took such a long time to raise the money, I said, no, let's do a separate movie. But I always knew it wouldn't repeat Came, but would go farther, in a more clear way. Also the rhythm is very different - slower, and as it gets closer to the end, it keeps slowing down. The scene where he cries - that's a two and a half or three minutes shot of him, just crying. I never wrote a real script - the dialogues and voiceovers were all improvised. It was more like a treatment, so the end was just described -'The butcher doesn't kill his daughter; he says, "I love you".' When I saw the movie on the editing table I decided I should add this voiceover at the end, to make things more clear.

PD: It's been said that Agnes B. (the French fashion designer who is credited as co-producer on the film) didn't want this ending.

GN: Agnes B. lent me money to make the film, which I have to pay her back from the first benefits, and she did it in a most generous and unbelievable way, so I am most grateful to her. The first time I showed the movie to her, she didn't expect that ending, because in the treatment the voiceover wasn't there, the butcher didn't say, 'I want to have sex with my daughter', and stuff like that... She says it was even more pessimistic than the rest of the movie. The horror has just started. He's lying to himself when he talks about love. He's just in need of affection, and a reason to survive. He's got no money, the police may be looking for him. He can have two hours or two days love with her, but it can't last. When the butcher says that we're just a piece of meat that thinks - I believe that. That's a very concrete perception of life. It's not about death. It's about survival, eating and working.

PD: What inspired you to make this particular movie?

GN: For the actor, Harvey Keitel was his main inspiration. For me, I was inspired by Papillon. The book is a very bleak story about someone surviving in the French prison system.

PD: How about Taxi Driver?

GN: I saw it just once, fifteen years ago. There's one scene in my film that comes from it - the scene in the porn cinema. But that's also me. I've been to many porn theatres myself since I was 18, just to prove to myself, finally, I'm a man! - and it's quite pathetic. You have all these old men watching the movie and staying for the next screening and the next screening and just waiting for the miracle, that they would have a hard-on.

PD: There's a list of directors in the end credits of the movie...

GN: It's not the directors that inspired me, it's directors who saw Carne and pushed me to do this one, or who advised me, or voted for me to get a grant that let me finish the movie. Sam Fuller really helped because he was living in Paris and once he had to decide one young French director to show, and he selected Came and he raved about it, and I was very happy. That touched me, that's why he's on the list. Dario Argento - he saw Carne and wanted to co-produce the feature, and then time went by and we'd have breakfast together, and nothing would happen... I didn't push too much, anyway, because it would have ended up being a Dario Argento production, because he's much bigger than me.

PD: It says in the credits that you shot in 16mm.

GN: It's not common to see a 16mm movie in Cinemascope, so people assume that it's 35mm and that we made it look grainy for some kind of aesthetic purpose, that we fought for it. If I hadn't put in the credits that it was 16mm I don't think many people would have noticed. I think it's important to set some limits, to make some conceptual decisions before starting a movie - for example, I never changed the lens. It's disturbing sometimes when you see the perspective change inside a movie. Bresson never changed his lens, and it looks great in his movies.

PD: You use some very unusual camera movements. Instead of just cutting from a wide to a close-up, the camera kind of crash-zooms in, but it also feels like a really fast dolly-in... how did you achieve that effect?

GN: Sometimes it's just pixilation, frame-by-frame, done between two shots - you move the camera across the distance between two shots, shooting a frame at a time. Some of them were done in post-production, where you have, like, a medium shot and go into a close-up, I would just make a zoom out of two or three images, as an optical effect. I see astonishing things in the editing on pop videos and experimental movies that you would never find in normal cinema. I shot every scene many different ways, I did single-frame effects during almost every scene, and sometimes I would use them, and sometimes not. It's on the editing table that you find out what works. The movie wasn't storyboarded - when you storyboard your scene you can't invent. I prefer operating the camera by myself, and deciding at the last moment all the images I can bring back. I couldn't not operate on my movies, just like I couldn't not edit. It's what filmmaking's about. I could more easily direct a movie I hadn't written. I did two commercials I like - one is for the French government, to encourage people to use condoms. It was like a seven-minute porn movie with explicit sex and a social purpose. The other is against hunting. They wanted a gory commercial. It was about five big men killing a little rabbit and getting a lot of pleasure out of it. I could never go hunting, but I'm very carnivorous - I eat a lot of meat, but I could never kill an animal. I eat horse meat. It's good.

PD: People here tend to find the idea pretty disgusting...

GN: Well, I don't know about Ireland, but I know that old British horses are sold to France and killed and eaten. So...

PD: Hmmm... I suppose we should now discuss the violence in your work.

GN: Carne is more graphic violence - the new one is more about social violence, and because it's longer, people get more inside the butcher's head. It's more depressing. But the reaction was more positive. With Carne a lot of people came out pissed off. I expected some very bad reactions, but I didn't get them. A lot of people cry at the end, though. When people say they hate the movie, I'm happy. When people say 'I cried', I'm happy. When people say they walked out, I'm happy. If someone said, 'It's boring', I'd say, 'well, I'll try to do better next time.' Otherwise, any reaction is good.

PD: What do you plan to do next?

GN: Someone has proposed me to direct 'Story of the Eye' by Georges Bataille.

PD: That would strike me as being unfilmable.

GN: No, it's a movie that's hard to finance, not to direct. That's always the problem for me - not writing, not directing, always financing, and being free to do what you want. Sometimes, because producers bring the money thay think they have the final decision - even in European movies...

PD: The press notes mention a planned drug movie.

GN: If it's good, it could be like Inauguration of the Pleasuredome (by Kenneth Anger) - I've seen it ten, fifteen, twenty times and never got bored. You just feel like you're stoned. My purpose is to make a movie with a normal narrative but as the characters get stoned, you get stoned, and you don't come back. It's structured like 2001 or Videodrome. It's going to be very visual. People won't guess that I directed it. That's what I like about Kubrick - you see Lolita, 2001 and The Shining - how can you tell it's the same director?

PD: What other movies do you watch repeatedly?

GN: I like violent movies in general, banned movies, underground movies - Un Chant d'Amour by Jean Genet, Anger, Tetsuo... Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I love. I can also watch mainstream movies, but... (He makes an eloquent but untranslatable Gallic shrug). The first time I saw Eraserhead, I was 16. It seemed to come from another world, maybe Germany in the thirties. Then there's an Austrian movie, Angst. It's about a man killing a family just in order to go back to prison, where he felt better. It's like a very dark, European version of Henry - Portrait of a Serial Killer, but much more baroque in its filming. It was banned all over the world - even in France it was one of the last movies to be X-rated for extreme violence. I think it's going to be rediscovered everywhere in the next few years.

At this point, the interview had to end so that Gaspar can grab a quick bite to eat before his audience Q&A session. I'm in the bar (where else?) when he comes looking for me, to tell me that he forgot to mention two very important films - Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's It Happened Here, and Alan Clarke's Scum. Then he's spirited away. Later, I discover that, rather than going to bed to get up at six in the morning for his flight, he stays up all night drinking with the Festival staff and then gets a cab to the airport. You've got to admire his style.