by James Mottram
“I like being secretive about my projects,” says Gaspar Noé, sitting in a beachside bar on the French Riviera. His fifth feature film, Climax, has just been unveiled in the Director’s Fortnight strand at the Cannes Film Festival. The Argentinean-born director is used to causing uproar here, notably when he brought 2002’s backwards-told rape-revenge tale Irréversible, but this is different. “I’ve got much better reviews [now] than in my whole life.”
Made under the radar, Climax arrived in Cannes with little known about it. Was it a documentary or fiction? Rumours flew around that it was about an urban dance troupe that flew into “a kind of Dionysian frenzy in an abandoned school”, as trade paper Screen International put it. Noé is desperate to keep at least some of Climax’s twists under cover. “I like watching movies without knowing what’s going to happen next.”
The rumours were, at least, partly true. Noé first hit on the idea of a dance movie when he visited a voguing ballroom in Paris last Christmas. The highly stylised dance – made famous by Madonna’s song ‘Vogue’ – left Noé reeling. “It was crowded. It was in a small ballroom. There were six hundred people. Very gay. Very black. I had never seen such a thing in Paris,” he marvels.
Suggesting a dance-inspired film to his producer, he prepped the movie in a month. “We started casting street dancers, whether they were Krumpers, Waackers, or Voguers. I noticed that at least half of the best dancers were black. I was very excited about the idea of a presentation of France in which people wouldn’t be white. It’s like when you see the national football team – it’s mostly black or Muslim.”
A lot of the casting was done with Noé exploring YouTube videos and websites. Much of it was done on the fly, like Souheila Yacoub – who plays a pregnant dancer. “I met her on a Friday night and I checked her dancing and acting skills on Saturday. And we called the agency and said, ‘OK, she’s shooting the movie on Monday.’” Yacoub had committed to a short movie but reconsidered. “I’m sure she doesn’t regret it.”
The only recognisable face in Noé’s cast is Sofia Boutella, who began dancing for Madonna before making a Hollywood career in films like Star Trek Into Darkness and The Mummy. Noé got hold of her via Instagram, aware of her dance skills but not her acting. “Up to this day – the truth – I have never seen a movie with her in it. But I have seen all the videos of her dancing.”
He convinced her to join the film as Selva, the troupe’s choreographer. It was Boutella – who hadn’t danced professionally for five years – who even suggested Noé bring in real-life choreographer Nina McNeely to work with the dancers. The only problem was Noé was entering this project with no script. “That freaked out Sofia!” the director says, with a devilish grin.
“She said, ‘How’s it going to be? What’s my character?’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, just come, we’ll party together!’ She was like, ‘Please tell me!’ I’m very scared of actors who say, ‘Where does the character come from? Where does he go?’ Like most people, we come from nowhere and go nowhere! But she was extremely cool.”
Bringing these diverse dance styles together was one of the more exciting elements for Noé. “They dance in such different ways. I wanted every single dancer to be at his best. The Voguing community is very gay. The Krumping community is very straight or heterosexual. And the Waackers are female Krumpers…. at the end, they all melded [together] and were extremely excited to learn the movements.”
As the film unfolds, the good times take a turn for the worse. Climax is Fame directed by the Marquis de Sade with a Steadicam, as one review put it. After the dancers rehearse their moves in a stunningly hypnotic sequence, they take a break to drink and relax. Energy crackles in the room but then everyone starts feeling weird…as somebody has spiked the sangria with LSD.
From hereon, Noé plunges viewers into a hellish odyssey that far exceeds his trippy 2009 drug-fuelled tale Enter The Void. Is this coming from personal experience?
“I’ve never been spiked,” he explains. “If you do some research, and you know what you’re going through, you can control the ride [on LSD]. But if someone puts anything in your drink, you can be almost sure that you’ll go to Hell.”
While Noé is extremely adept at showing just what a bad trip can be like – this is about as close as it gets without actually experiencing it – he’s not setting out to moralise about the dangers of hallucinogenic chemicals. “The worse memories of my life are not linked to drugs,” he notes. “They’re mostly linked to alcohol. People losing control…especially with girls. Girls can become so dramatic on alcohol.”
Despite the high level of improvisation, some things had to be planned in advance. Like the music which needed to be cleared ahead of time. “There were some songs that we really wanted to include that we could not,” the director explains. “I wanted to put ‘I Feel Love’ in an instrumental version but the family of Donna Summer said they wouldn’t want the music to be used in a movie dealing with drugs.”
This being a Gaspar Noé movie, there is little that’s conventional. The credits pop up midway through the movie. “I always wanted to cut the movie in two parts,” he says. So you have ‘before’ and ‘after’.” It begins, meanwhile, with a proclamation: ‘A French production and proud of it.’ “In France, people love that,” he smiles. “It’s like when you go to the World Cup and people are fighting for their flag.”
After the positivity surrounding Climax – which has yet to secure an Australian release – Noé is already considering his next move, but don’t expect him to reveal anything just yet. “I enjoy not giving away much information. When you announce a movie, you have all the actors in France calling you: ‘I want to be in your movie!’ That’s sometimes the nightmare of a director.”
