“Love,” Gaspar Noé’s tale of a messy relationship, may come as a bit of a surprise to those familiar the French director’s work, which — especially “Irreversible” (2002) but also “Enter the Void” (2009) — has been accused of using unnecessary shock tactics. His beat-you-over-the-head approach can be claustrophobic, even painful, and it’s easy to see “Love,” with its unsimulated sex scenes and in-your-face 3-D imagery, as the next logical step. But these gimmicks frame a story—of Murphy (Karl Glusman), and his intoxicating whirlwind romance with Electra (Aomi Muyock) — that is tender in a way unusual for Noé. Murphy, an American film student living in Paris, has an apartment full of movie posters and gushes about his obsession with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” while Electra wants to be a painter (both talk about work but seldom do any). They are connected by a shared carefreeness that turns ugly when they invite a third partner (Klara Kristin) to join them for a passionate roll in the hay scored by Funkadelic’s epic drugged-out guitar wail “Maggot Brain.” Soon enough stubborn jealousies and stupid mistakes push them past the point of no return. Murphy is left, married and with a child, to sulk in his apartment while struggling with his past. In a recent conversation with ARTINFO, Noé talked about the degree to which “Love” is autobiographical, the long process of getting the film into production, and how older male critics are jealous of the main character.Is “Love” autobiographical?Not on a personal scale. On a large scale, it’s about the kind of life I’d been living since I was 20 in France. It’s about personal events, but it’s mostly about describing my friends’ and my kind of sexual-love addiction.Your name is used for two people in the film, and you appear as a pivotal character. Certain elements are close to my behavior or to my experiences, but many of them are linked to my friends’ lives as well.When you began writing the film, did you speak to your friends about this sexual-love addiction?As a human, you have a life but you’re also part of a group. I would say the film is a group portrait. It’s not a personal portrait. Most of my friends have those same posters [that are in Murphy’s apartment], which I also have—things like that.It’s been a few years since you released your previous film, “Enter the Void.” Did the subject matter of “Love” make it difficult to get it off the ground?When I’m making a film, I’m obsessional, a perfectionist, and quite a workaholic. The moment you finish a movie, you start the promotion, which can be exhausting. You have to refresh your mind before you start another movie. I don’t think I could be like Steven Soderbergh or [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder, doing two or three movies a year. It’s not in my genes. Emotionally speaking, I wouldn’t be able to handle that. But sometimes you’re just waiting for the financing. And since my last movies were unpredictable, commercially speaking, before people bet on you, they think a lot. Some people said yes and then disappeared. It took me a long time to find the financing for “Love,” even though “Irreversible” was a commercial success, and “Enter the Void” was a commercial success. I hope that in the future I will find someone who is rich enough to just say, “Yes, let’s go for it.” Some directors have that opportunity, an automatic green light.Have you ever had that in the past?Actually, I had that on “Irreversible,” which was done without a real script. The movie was green-lighted by name-dropping the cast. I knew I could start the movie, even though I didn’t have a title or a script. We just started preparing the movie and shot it. In this case, there were no famous actors. The only known name was mine. Also, it’s true that that project was risky commercially.This project has been in the works for a long time, right?I wrote the treatment for “Love” 13 or 14 years ago. It was only five pages long. I thought I would shoot it on 16mm in France and self-produce it. One day I ran into Vincent Cassel, and he said, “What are you preparing?” I told him I wanted to make “Enter the Void,” but it’s a big-budget movie with lots of technical problems, and I wouldn’t be able to start it anytime soon. But I have this other idea in mind, I said, this erotic melodrama. He said he might be interested [in starring in it] with Monica [Bellucci]. When I told the producers, they said, “We will find the money to finance [the film].” But when Vincent and Monica read the treatment, they thought it was too intimate. They didn’t want to share their intimacy with an audience. I went back to the producers and told them. But I said, “We have the money. Vincent and Monica are free this summer. Let’s do something else.” And that’s how “Irreversible” was created.How did you get from the original idea of shooting the film on 16mm to shooting it in 3-D?At the time “Avatar” hadn’t come out, and after that more people started doing movies in 3-D. And now, technically speaking, it’s far more precise and colorful and easier to shoot in 3-D. And I got a grant from the French government that paid for the extra costs to shoot in 3-D.When you decided you were going to shoot this film in 3-D, were there visual ideas that you were excited about exploring that were not possible shooting on 16mm?No. At one point I wanted to do more 3-D effects, but the truth is that we started shooting in mid-October of last year for four weeks, stopped for two months, and then picked up shooting at the end of January and the beginning of February. Then I was editing for two months, and the film was selected for Cannes, so I had to finish it very quickly. I could have kept editing the movie for a few more months and would have done additional visual effects. The film was selected for Cannes at the last moment and was released immediately after, and now it’s being released in the U.S. and all over the world. In my contract I said maybe I would deliver the film by this December. So I didn’t have as much time to play with the editing as I did with “Enter the Void.”Do you ever have the desire to go back and continue to edit the film after it’s released?You can always rework a movie, and I know which things I would change. But the movie is out there, and [continuing to work on it] all depends how much of your personal money you want to invest in the production, if you want to keep it in the fridge or keep cooking. But I had private investors who were excited to show the film in Cannes, so the postproduction process happened extremely fast.Have you been surprised by the reaction to the film, that people focus completely on the sex?The reception has been very good. In Cannes you always have half of the press trashing the movie. People are not really focused at Cannes — people are drinking, and partying, and watching too many movies. It’s like they are going to an arena to either put two thumbs up or two thumbs down. It’s better to not pay too much attention to the press that comes out of there. But I’ve noticed that the most aggressive reactions to the film are always coming from older men. I think the movie maybe created some envy, because the bad reviews were always trashing Karl [Glusman] and me. They do not enjoy somebody showing his dick on screen.
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