In Gaspar Noé’s latest movie, Love, a film student named Murphy asks his then-girlfriend Electra what her ultimate fantasy is, to which she responds, “Can you show me how tender you can be?” It’s hard not to imagine the query being posed by audiences to Noé himself, an Argentina-born filmmaker who earned simultaneous devotion and disdain with his brutally violent features I Stand Alone (1998) and Irréversible (2002). Enter the Void (2009), his psychedelic portmanteau of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, cemented an ample cult following. This month the sex-laden follow-up Love is unleashed stateside in 3-D (currently showing in New York and opening Friday in Los Angeles), and while it may be a somewhat atypically “tender” yarn for the director, it’s still fittingly provocative and unmistakably Noé.
Vanity Fair: What’s the genesis of Love? Is it at all autobiographical?
Gaspar Noé: It’s simply the desire to see a narrative film that portrays love as I know it: ecstatic, painful, addictive. The main character is not me, but like a younger brother—[who’s] not always smart—that I care for and who’s going through emotional situations that most of my friends and myself have been through.
What was it like directing your first film in 3-D?
Calibrating the 3-D cameras every morning made the shooting shorter, and the 3-D color-grading made the process much longer. But I’m extremely happy with the result, which adds an additional feeling of intimacy to the film. And I like it even better when the movie is screened using Dolby glasses, which are much brighter and [more] colorful than all the other 3-D systems.
And what about directing the un-choreographed/un-simulated sex scenes?
Who said they were choreographed, un-choreographed, simulated or un-simulated?! We did a movie about a precise subject and we all simply wanted the love scenes to seem real so the audience could relate to their own life experiences . . . and hopefully the images do. How they were shot—tricked or not—isn’t an issue.
On that note, “art” versus “pornography”—do you observe a distinction? Does it matter?
Those two words are too heavy, and I don’t relate to them. I like making movies that are like life, and almost all commercial—or even auteur—movies seem to portray a world in which true love isn’t sexual. And that’s a huge lie. Life is erotic.
Was Love edited down for U.S. audiences?
No way. Not even for Saudi Arabia.
In distributing your films internationally, what differences have you noticed in terms of reception from country to country?
[Love] seems to be funnier or transgressive for the English-speaking audiences, and more sentimental and sexier in the Eastern European or South American countries in which the movie has been released.
Do you have any new projects queued on your horizon?
I would like to shoot a film in Africa someday. Also [a] documentary using all the best cinematic tools of a narrative movie. But I’m not in any starting block yet.
Would you ever consider working in the realm of television? Do you think there’s any legitimacy to the format being hailed as “the new art house”?
I always hear great things about some TV series that I haven’t seen, but I mostly enjoy watching old classics or unrated movies on a big CinemaScope screen. If the TV people can give you money, freedom, and the possibility to release the movie in theaters, I don’t see [any] problem. But as [in anything] the more money people give you, the less artistic freedom you get. That’s why I like being produced from countries like France, in which the constitution gives final cut to the director.