Following a two-hour masterclass at the Cairo Film Festival, Gaspar Noé spoke with Variety about future genres he’d like to tackle: “The main film genres that really would interest me for a future project are documentary, war film, and horror. Probably I should even try to mix those three genres. I also would like to do a movie with young children, or a movie for children.”
The Argentinian director of “Irreversible” (2002) and “Vortex” (2021) had earlier told the audience of his sold out event: “Kids are like small adults. When we are kids we are in danger. You are exposed to everything. I’m very attached to kids in life though I don’t have kids. The relationship you have with kids is direct and playful. I would like to do a movie with little kids. They relate to fragility, they relate to the dangers that they’re exposed to.”
Noé spoke about the influence of his mother on his films – her career as a social worker pointed him towards the poorest, most disaffected members of society and her love of film saw him watching all kinds of film at a precocious age. “I remember the skeleton fight from ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ (1963) when I was four and ‘2001: a Space Odyssey’ (1968) when I was six. I didn’t even know what a baby was. I asked what that big thing was at the end of the film.” The emotional impact would affect his entire career and especially “Enter the Void” (2009) – “my Kubrick film.”
His mother’s taste in transgressive films gave him an early primer in what some then saw as controversial material: “I went to see a Fassbinder film when I was 10 with her at the cinematheque in Buenos Aires. I didn’t know what lesbians were and I was watching films about them.”
From his father, an artist, Noé took the idea of playfulness in art, delighting in using gimmicks such as the onscreen announcement in his 1998 debut feature “I Stand Alone” warning patrons to leave the theater. “It was an old William Castle movie with Joan Crawford called ‘Homicide’ which had a title card that said you have 10 seconds to leave the cinema so I stole it. Afterwards I checked the Castle movie and it was good but I used it better.” A less obvious influence was Vittorio de Sica’s “Umberto D” (1952).
“Irreversible,” his infamous Cannes shocker from 2002, starring Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, was influenced by Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” (1983), from which it took the idea of reversing the chronological order of scenes, and Michael Winner’s “Death Wish” (1974). The point-of-view subjective camera in “Enter the Void” was taken from the 1947 film noir “Lady in the Lake.”
Given that so many of his films have caused controversy with their extremity, I asked if he had ever regretted filming something, or conversely, wished he had gone farther: “Luckily, I have no regrets about my past movies. But I had some projects in mind years ago that excite me less nowadays. It’s better to start a film production while the subject excites you. Some movie ideas can stop interesting you as the world and your own life evolve, and new ideas suddenly feel stronger.”
Hopefully, that new idea might gift us the most shocking development in his career: a Gaspar Noé’s kids movie.
