Gaspar Noé: bringing carnal knowledge into the third dimension

In Love 3D, Murphy, an ex-pat American and aspiring filmmaker, fantasises about former girlfriend Electra while his partner Omi and their young son are out for the day. Murphy's reveries slowly coalesce into an explicit chronicle of his relationship with Electra, replete with betrayals, threesomes, and ejaculation, all in glorious 3D.

We'd expect nothing less from Gaspar Noé, noted cinematic enfant terrible, even against the rocks and shocks of the New French Extremism that emerged at the turn of the millennium. The hard-hitting film-maker behind the nine-minute rape sequence in Irréversible, the family face-shooting of I Stand Alone, and the vagina-cam sex of Enter the Void ought, one feels, to be devoid of levity.

Then again, maybe it’s in keeping with the Noé brand disruption that he’s a chatty, jolly soul.

“Do you want to know why the character is called Murphy?” he chuckles. “It’s because my grandfather was Irish. When everybody else was immigrating to the United States, he went to Argentina. And my mother told me that once a year, every summer, he would only drink tea for a month, so that his body would be prepared if food became scarce again. So when I was younger, and we lived in New York for a time, I adopted the name Gaspar Noé Murphy. I thought my surname was too short.”

He laughs: “Actually, when I was looking for an actor, I was hoping to find an Irish one, not an American because Irish is a neutral accent. But because I ended up with an American, everyone decided the movie was somehow about France and America.”

Similarly, many have speculated that Love 3D is semi-autobiographical. The director, insists, however, that Murphy is more like an errant "little brother".

“He’s like a lot of guys in my films,” says Noé, “He’s a random cool guy. That doesn’t make him heroic. In fact, I was far more concerned with casting the women in the film and getting them right. Murphy could have been Irish or Swedish or tall or short. The girls are far more mature than he is, as girls usually are. They are more defined.”

Interestingly, the actors aren’t professionals and the set-ups – even those that involve orgies, swinger clubs and threesomes – were not choreographed. That must feel like working without a safety net, surely?

Experienced

“It’s more like playing a game,” says the film-maker. “I’m not using non-professional actors. I’m working with people who are intelligent and responsive. Everybody involved in the movie, even those behind the camera, have experience of love and life and break-ups. We are all making a movie together. It’s collaborative. Every day is a surprise. Every scene is a surprise. There’s a magic that comes out of all these different versions.”

So there’s no storyboards or script at all?

“No. Because with storyboards – unless you’re really sure that you want something in particular – you’re putting yourself in a jail. I enjoy the ideas that come from the actors or others on set. You don’t feel as if you are making the movie alone.”

Noé had already been working on Love 3D when Blue Is the Warmest Colour emerged to rave notices: "I was moved by it," he says. "I was moved by its depiction of love as messy and as a kind of weird addiction to brain chemicals."

Body films

Interestingly, Love 3D's Murphy hopes to one day make films about "blood, semen, and tears". Douglas Sirk reputedly used the same phrase when explaining to Rainer Werner Fassbinder that "to make a good melodrama, you need, sperm, blood and tears".

It is, moreover, something of a theme with Noé, whose films are seldom short on carnality and body fluids, and who used the Sirk definition during the Enter the Void press conference at Cannes.

“Of course,” he says. “I think in life everything is physical or mechanical. Even love is about brain chemistry: it’s a mix of serotonin, dopamine, endorphins. And then the reproduction of DNA.”

Nobody was more surprised than Noé when Love 3D premiered at this year's Cannes Film Festival to cheers and applause. After all, he's accustomed to more, uh, divisive receptions.

“Half the reviews are always hateful,” he laughs. “But I enjoy reading them. It’s like a cold shower, you know? Sometimes you read something about the film that you weren’t conscious of at all. And sometimes people are saying more about their own lives and themselves than about you. In Cannes, many critics were focused on the male nudity for reasons that were totally anachronistic. Why is male nudity a problem when female nudity is everywhere?

"But then there was one article in Time magazine. It was very calm and considered. It said that maybe that's how we should portray love, because that's how love is. And that was exactly what I wanted to do."