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Interview: Gaspar Noé on the Split-Screen Spectacles of Lux Æterna and Vortex

Gaspar Noé discusses his use of split-screen, and what he thinks about death after grappling with it so directly across his work.

Gaspar Noé on the Split-Screen Spectacles of Lux Æterna and Vortex
Photo: A24

Conceived and created at two radically different times, the two latest works by Gaspar Noé will wash up on American shores in consecutive weeks. The first, Lux Æterna, began as a Saint Laurent-commissioned short film project that spiraled outward into a 52-minute meta-movie about the connection between witchcraft and filmmaking. The second, Vortex, arose from Covid-related restrictions confining his camera to a limited scope.

While worlds apart tonally, Lux Æterna and Vortex function in a complementary fashion, just like the split-screen technique employed in both films. Noé remains acutely aware of the sensory impact that his imagery has on viewers, using his signature aesthetic to overwhelm eyes and ears alike. This is most immediately evident in Lux Æterna, in which the director harnesses the full power of light and sound to conjure the agony and ecstasy of filmmaking.

But if Lux Æterna finds Noé in a familiar mode of provocation, Vortex makes for a counterbalancing emotional evolution. His somber survey of senility, starring Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun, locates an invigorating avenue through which he can keep surprising audiences, as formally unexpected as it is thematically unsettling.

I spoke with Noé while he was in New York to promote the openings of both films. Our conversation covered a range of topics, from how he determines the duration of his projects, why he chose to use split-screen for both Lux Æterna and Vortex, to what he thinks about death after grappling with it so directly across his work.

Does it feel weird that Vortex and Lux Æterna are being released almost like a double bill in the U.S.?

Nah, I’m happy they’ll release at the same time so I can do the promotion together! [Publicity] isn’t the most boring part of this process, but sometimes it’s the most repetitive. So, if you can promote two movies in a row, then you can you can start working on another one. But the weird thing about Lux Æterna is that it’s just 52 minutes. It was fully financed and produced by Saint Laurent. They gave me money to make a movie that would be six to 10 minutes in length. I never expected the movie to get so much attention by being released theatrically in France, Russia, Spain, Japan, and now in the States and the U.K. as a feature film. I like it for what it is. I like it for its length. And it has some similarities with Vortext: Both are French and use split-screen. But one of them is very funny, and the other one is as sad as a movie can be.

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How do you determine the right length for the stories you want to tell?

When I finished Lux Æterna, many people said, “Why do you use a split screen? If you would just put the scenes one after the other instead of putting them on the right and on the left side, we could have a feature.” I said, “I don’t want to have a feature. I want to have a good movie!” I decided I’d rather have a movie with two things going on screen simultaneously. The movie has a perfect length. It could have been longer if we had more days of shooting, but Lux Æterna was improvised out of a three-line script. We had five days of shooting, so it’s really magic that we managed to do such a good thing in such a short time.

But when it comes to Vortex, it made more sense to have it shot with two separate screens telling the interlinked lives of these two members of a normal couple who live under the same roof but are disconnected by some mental disease. So, in that case, I didn’t know because I did not write the dialogue, and we could not measure the demands of the scenes beforehand.

I thought the movie would be 80 or 90 minutes long. It ended up being two hours and 20 minutes long with two screens, so if you add the two sides, it’s like four hours and 40 minutes of images. But the movie, from my point of view, is perfect at two hours and 20 minutes. Some of the movies I admire the most in my life don’t have that common, traditional length of 90 minutes. 2001: A Space Odyssey is very long, and Un Chien Andalou is 17 minutes, and that’s my favorite movie. The French movie that I’m the most obsessed with from the ’70s, The Mother and the Whore, is three hours and 30 minutes long, and I can watch it over and over. If the movie was six hours long, I would enjoy it even better.

Gaspar Noé on the Split-Screen Spectacles of Lux Æterna and Vortex
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Béatrice Dalle in Lux Æterna. © Yellow Tail Pictures

Did you start Lux Æterna not envisioning that it would utilize split-screen?

I think I envisioned it at the end of the first day of shooting. When I started shooting, I thought I would do it like Climax, with long master shots that I would match with invisible cuts, and like Iñárritu did for Birdman. But we were so unprepared that the result after one day of shooting wasn’t catastrophic, but I could not keep the whole take. I wanted to do a four-minute master shot at the beginning. But I had evidence that the discussion starting the movie with Béatrice and Charlotte was not very good. So, at the end of the first day, I decided that from the next day on I would shoot the whole movie with two cameras so I could edit it.

Lux Æterna is a movie that’s over-edited, and the idea of using the split screen came in the process of pre-editing it. And there are moments that have a triple screen. On the very last day of shooting, I begged Charlotte to stay an additional 30 minutes, and she said, “No, I have to go run to a dinner!” I said, “No, please stay!” And we reshot the dialogue that we did on the first day because it wasn’t very good. She finally agreed to arrive 30 minutes later to her dinner. And the scene we reshot that day was really good.

I think if I hadn’t done that with Lux Æterna, I’m sure that Vortex wouldn’t be shot with two cameras. But the dialogue between Béatrice and Charlotte was so funny that I kept to 12 out of the 30 minutes of the improvisation, and the result was so good that I saw that I could do another movie using that same technique. Dario Argento is extremely charismatic, very inventive; Françoise Lebrun too. I like going to the set as the documentary directors go to location. You don’t know what’s going to come out, but you know [you’re] going to scratch the surface to see which essential things can be captured by the camera.

And for Vortex, it’s my understanding that you also didn’t start out shooting in split-screen and needed some reshoots?

Because it was a really low-budget movie, it came out of my producer saying, “Do you have an idea for a movie with two or three characters in a single location that you could shoot during the confinement?” I said, “Yeah, but I want to make a movie with an old couple. And if they’re not vaccinated, it’s gonna be difficult because I want them to be close to one another.” The two of them and the young actor [Alex Lutz] were vaccinated, but all the rest of the crew was not. There was a paranoid feeling during the whole shoot because everybody was afraid of Covid. We had two Covid inspectors on the set, and they were the first two to get infected! The mood on the set was very good, but it was very claustrophobic. On the first day of shooting, we were not ready. We rehearsed something just with the camera to see how we worked. Then we had 19 days of shooting, and it was really stressful to try to do the whole movie in chronological order. On the second day, we started with a scene that I shot with one camera, and then we had another scene with two cameras. It became evident that morning that we had to shoot the whole movie with two cameras, so we reshot the scene that was one camera.

Does shooting in split-screen affect the way you compose a shot? Are you thinking about the ways in which the panels will play off each other, such as the moment when the man reaches out across the frame to hold his wife’s hand?

I didn’t expect that to happen! In that scene, I asked the kid to hit the car with all he’s got, and I even promised him a gift if he would just smash the car into the other car. During the second take, he became so psychotic that Françoise started crying for real. Everything becomes very touching, and Dario felt worried for her so he moved his hand to touch her. And on the real take, he even said, “Are you okay, Françoise?” Since she’s not supposed to be called Françoise in the movie, I had to erase the word with “mon amour.” But that was a joyful accident of shooting with two cameras because [his arm] looks elastic. I had another surprise when editing the scene in which the father and son are discussing the institution they could go to. I put the mother in the middle, and when she moves back on the sofa, she has two heads instead of one. That was also a very joyful surprise that I had envisioned. I thought, “Well, I didn’t expect this to happen.” But once I had put the two images next to each other, I discovered that.

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You’ve described committing to split-screen for Vortex as a choice to be “playful.” Why was that important to you in a movie that can be quite grim?

It’s playful because most people don’t do it. On an emotional level, it’s evident that it works. You understand the concept without even seeing it as a concept. Every spectator who sees the movie will see the split-screen and say, “Okay, it’s gonna be like that.” And then you don’t pay attention to the split-screen anymore. One side of your brain is following one screen, and the other is following the other. And also, the fact of having the two screens inside the screen, especially when you’re in a big theater, creates a rapid eye movement. Now these are things that they are using the post-traumatic therapy, where your eyes are moving from the left to the right, and it creates a state of hypnosis that makes the movie seem shorter than two hours and 22 minutes. Some people have seen the movie twice, and they say, “It’s weird, I felt like the second time I was watching almost a new movie because I was watching the other side.”

Are you doing scientific research into how movies act on the brain, or are you going purely off instinct and artistry?

[shrugs] It’s overwhelming if you see it in a movie theater. But probably, if you watch the same movie on a laptop, it will not be overwhelming. It’ll just be another movie. Nowadays, people are used to multiple screens because of Zoom, since Covid appeared. Every day, you’re dealing with two, three people inside the same screen. When you see something that’s “eye-blowing,” you remember it. I’m the kind of filmmaker that avoids classical movies. I never watch TV. I like watching documentaries. But if anybody says, “Oh, there’s a movie with very strange editing effects or sounds,” of course I run to see it. But there are so few around.

You thank Dario Argento in the credits of I Stand Alone. What was his role?

He had seen my [short film] Carne, and he said to me, “Oh, you have to make a feature out of it! Can I help you?” He proposed co-producing a feature version of Carne that actually became a separate movie, I Stand Alone. I had met him in Toronto in ‘91 during the film festival, and I have photos of me and him having dinner for the first time. He was lovely to me. Since then, we have become very close friends.

Gaspar Noé on the Split-Screen Spectacles of Lux Æterna and Vortex
Dario Argento, Alex Lutz, and Françoise Lebrun in Vortex. © Utopia

How do you think now having outright collaborated will affect or inspire your work moving forward?

With the help of his daughter, Asia, we managed to convince him to be in the movie, and he’s extremely happy that he did this movie. He says, “I’m not gonna play another movie because I’m not an actor, but I did it for my friend Gaspar.” Also, I think he did it because he really loved Italian neorealism. He has a particular affection for Umberto D., as I do. When I proposed the part to him, he said, “Well, I’m young!” I said, “You’re young, but remember the movie Umberto D.?” And then we started talking about it, and he said, “Okay, I understand.”

He was also going to start a feature film, and his movie was postponed for Covid reasons. He had two months free before getting back to his pre-production. Very happily for me and the movie, he could accept the part. He’s so charismatic that now I cannot imagine who else could have played that part. And initially, I said, “Oh, I probably should call the movie Dementia.” There was a really good movie from the ’50s called Dementia. But this dementia is about senility, the state of mind of the woman. The whole situation is very demented, so it could have been called Dementia. But imagine a movie by Gaspar Noé, the director of Enter the Void and Climax called Dementia and starring Dario Argento. Everybody would have thought it was a horror movie! Then I decided on this other title that makes more sense.

Speaking of Climax, do you feel any differently about its title card reading “death is an extraordinary experience” after the experience of making Vortex?

That is not a joke. I don’t know why people are so afraid of this. Death is nothing. We hit a wall, and then it’s over. The New York Times review of my movie said, “We dream for a while, and then we sleep.” Death is just the underlining of a sentence. There’s a starting point, and there’s an end point. There’s nothing before, there’s nothing after, there’s nothing below. Our whole life, our dreams, are floating like a cloud above the void. I like saying, “Is there life before death?” Because there’s no life after death…but is there one before? [laughs]

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If you have no belief that life exists beyond this and no faith that even the work of someone as accomplished as yourself will live on, what’s the point of it all?

No, we’re not creating pyramids. The movies will survive for a few years, as long as people have [something to play them on]…and as long as World War III doesn’t destroy them. When you see what’s going on today, it teaches you to be humble. Because you should do things for the present time and not for posterity if it seems right to you. But even if you make kids, your kids are not like you. They probably have part of your genes, but they’re so different that you’re not surviving through them. Take the dream for what it is, and enjoy it for as long as it lasts.

You’ve mentioned having an interest in pushing the envelope aesthetically. Is there anything catching your eye right now?

For a moment, people were excited about virtual reality. But the helmets are a bit funny when you see a guy from the outside. Probably there’s going to be some kind of new cinematic art coming soon, but it’s not really created yet.

Are you watching anything like TikTok where people are composing for vertical frames with rapid cuts?

Uhh, no. I like the square format. People don’t play too much with the format, but I like CinemaScope because it’s close to the human perception than the 1.33 format. For example, when I collect photos or paintings, I like the square format. But if you put a square inside a CinemaScope frame, it’s like, “Why do you have so much black on both sides?”

Marshall Shaffer

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based film journalist. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies.

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