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28064212
Special Agent Dale Cooper




Registered: 01/15/11
Posts: 12,115
Loc: Twin Peaks
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Enter The Void
#14230973 - 04/03/11 12:26 PM (12 years, 9 months ago) |
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I finally watched Enter The Void last night.  It was brilliant, IMHO. It's even more interesting when you find out about the director/writer and his vision.
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The idea for the film had been growing since Noé's adolescence, when he first started to become interested in matters of death and existence. In his early twenties he saw Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake, a 1947 film shot entirely in a first person perspective, while under influence from psilocybin mushrooms. He then decided that if he ever made a film about the afterlife, that was the way it would be filmed. Noé had been writing on different versions of the screenplay for fifteen years before it officially went into production. The story had initially been more linear, and the drafts were set in different locations including the Andes, France and New York City.[1] Tokyo was eventually chosen both because it could provide the colourful environments required for the film's hallucinogenic aspects, and because of Japan's repressive drug laws, which would add to the drama and explain the intensity of the main character's fear of the police.
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Noé had tried various hallucinogens in his youth and used those experiences as inspiration for the visual style. One particular drug experience came later, when the director already was planning the film, and traveled to the Peruvian jungle to try Ayahuasca where it is legal.[11] The experience was very intense and Noé regarded it "almost like professional research."[2] Since few in the design team ever had taken a hallucinogen, it became necessary for Noé to collect and provide visual references in the forms of paintings, photographs, music videos and excerpts from films.[12] The work of botanist Edouard Marie Heckel was one reference used for the organic patterns seen during Oscar's visions.
Another important influence were the experimental films of Kenneth Anger, and in particular Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Noé was recommended Anger's films in the early 1990s, while promoting the short film Carne, and quickly became a fan. Other influences from experimental cinema included the works of Jordan Belson and Peter Tscherkassky.[15] Among mainstream films, the most prominent influence was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is Noé's favourite film, and made him want to become a filmmaker after he saw it at the age of seven.[16] Snake Eyes and other films by Brian De Palma also influenced Enter the Void with their hovering overhead shots which contributed to Noé's desire to make a whole film from a similar perspective.[9]
There were two reasons for showing Oscar's head and shoulders within the frame during the flashback scenes, rather than letting the camera be the character's eyes. The first was that this is the way Noé usually sees himself in dreams and when recalling past events. It was also because he thought it would become easier to care for a character who is shown, as many point-of-view films in his opinion look unintentionally funny.[9]
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As Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void’s trippy meditation on life and death appears in cinemas, we caught up with the director for a chat about the making of the film…
Published on Sep 21, 2010
It's unsurprising, given the assaultive, powerful and often disturbing nature of Gaspar Noé's movies, which have included the controversial I Stand Alone and Irreversible, that an interview with the director himself should prove to be so unusual and meandering.
Speaking enthusiastically and at breakneck speed, Noé discussed the making of his latest film, Enter The Void, an extraordinarily hypnotic, individual meditation on life, drugs, sex and death...
The film is astonishingly ambitious, both technically and philosophically. There can't be many directors attempting to show what it's like to die in the first person and then be reincarnated. What set you on the path to such a film?
I read books on reincarnation and many books about out-of-body experiences. Actually, the movie is not so much about reincarnation. It's more about someone who gets shot while on acid and DMT [Dimethyltryptamine], and trips out about his own death and dreams about his soul escaping from his flesh, because he wants to keep this promise to his sister that he'll never leave her, even after death.
I don't believe in life after death. But I still enjoyed the idea of doing a movie that would portray that collective dream, that collective need. Like flying saucers are a collective need for people who need to believe in flying saucers. You don't need to believe in flying saucers to do a movie about Martians or flying saucers.
You just say, well, it's in literature and books and people need to believe there's something after [death] because otherwise life is too short. It's better to tell people that, don't worry, life is short but you get to have a second chance. You can survive and always rearrange things that happened in your lifetime.
That's what all religions rely on. They say you'll be rewarded somewhere up there in the sky, or if you misbehave you'll go to hell. But those are brainwashing tools to make people take their money and bring it to the churches.
Buddhists are not as hardcore as Catholics and other religions, but they're still, I think, part of such a huge lie that it's scary. I didn't want to promote that lie, and at the end, when you see the baby coming out from the mother's belly, you don't see the face of [the central character's] sister, you see the face of the mother, so you don't know if you're seeing his original birth. He's recreating a false memory of that traumatic moment that was his birth when he discovered light and oxygen. Or is he just getting into a loop, and your perception of time is only likened to how your brain is built.
You don't know if the character died at the start of the movie, or if he's going to wake up in a morgue, or in hospital, or in prison. You don't really know what happened after he got shot. The only part that is really specific is the beginning.
Then, technically, the movie is very complex, and I was happy that this project was delayed and delayed and delayed for many reasons. I was not financially bankable, because I had not made a commercial success before Irreversible, so the movie could finally happen after Irreversible, and would never have happened before.
And also, the fact that it was delayed meant the beautiful aesthetic I got for this movie is far, far better than anything I could have dreamt of eight years ago.
Towards the end, the weird trip turns into a bad trip, like sometimes mushroom trips or acid trips turn into bad trips. But a bad trip can be very rewarding, because when you come out of one, it's like coming out of a bad dream where you get killed or something, and the moment you wake up, you still feel the presence of that reality and the dream, or the nightmare, is always real. But you feel so safe coming back to the real world, and some people said when they came out of this movie that they were still scared.
Kubrick said something about 2001, that it's an acid religious movie. I did another acid movie pretending to be religious or Buddhist, but at the end, it's dysfunctional enough to see that it's not all it seems.
You mentioned the trip that turns bad at the beginning. It's almost like its own separate film. How much input did you have in that sequence?
Actually, I drank a few times Ayahuasca, which is a drink full of DMT that is only legal in the Amazonian jungle, so you have to go there to take it. And when you drink it, you have visions that are far scarier or far more futuristic than any visions in altered states you can get from any other means.
You forget that you have a human form and that you're on a planet. It's a really hardcore experience that I absolutely do not regret, as when I went there I was already thinking about this project, and I was thinking about images. It was almost like professional research.
So, you always have this excuse, that you're not just going there for some existential means, you're going there for professional reasons.
Sorry, what was the question?
Did someone help you with the psychedelic...
No, no, I came back, and one day I was in a city where a guy told me about smokeable DMT, and I said I know, there's another version of DMT that you smoke that lasts as fine and strong. And I said that when I smoked DMT once, it's like an Ayahuasca trip, with the promise that Ayahuasca lasts four or five hours, and that seems like a whole day.
Sometimes it's like a crazy journey, but when you smoke DMT you say, "Oh, I had a great trigger for a four hour movie, or a one-day-long movie and then I did a second time and once again the trip was very intense, but it just does it for five minutes, and then the moment was gone.
I said, "Well, instead of having the guy being on acid at the beginning, I should do a DMT trip that would last five minutes on screen like it lasts in real life," but the point then is how to portray those visions that are very graphic and very geometrical.
Very many people say that they look like the movie Tron, that they are just bright neon lights, and so, of course, they were going to be done with computer graphics, and hopefully I was working with this company who accepted not only to do the visual effects but also to co-produce the movie.
BUF are the best in France and Pierre Buffin, visual effects provider and co-producer of the movie, put me in contact with the best graphic designer since his company, but worried that his best graphic designers were doing DMT visions or that they had never even experienced mushrooms, so I had to have all these visual references. I want the shapes of the underwater forms of life. I want them to be made of neon lights and I want the background to be black. It has to be scary.
And they came up with many different visuals that were really amazing, that allowed them to make this five-minute film. At the end, some people who were DMT smokers, they came up to me and said it's close.
Sometimes when you're on Ayahuasca, you have visions that are almost too simple, too silly, to be spiritual images. You feel that you're going through a tunnel. It's like in dreams, where you never know if you're going to have a nightmare or a sweet dream. I read that maybe the molecule that makes you have dreams is the DMT that you have inside your brain.
So, actually, if you smoke it or you drink it, you have very long and colourful dreams that you would have any night, but only in a small amount. The DMT's inside your brain already.
And there's another theory that when people have these final trips where they're dying or near death, it's because of the amount of DMT. Because of a car crash, because of fear, because of this or that.
The film's psychedelic use of colour, it reminded me of Japanese videogames and Japanese anime. Is that why you set Enter The Void in that country, because of its colourful culture and the neon signs and so on?
Tokyo's like a huge pinball machine. The first time you're there, and you don't understand what's going on, it's like "ding ding ding ding ding" everywhere. The lights are changing, the neon lights are moving.
In Hong Kong you also have that, but I'd been to Hong Kong just once, and I'd been to Tokyo 15 times. I love their cinema, I love their nightclubs, I love being there. I thought Tokyo would be the very best place to shoot this movie.
And, of course, if you get busted with any drugs in Japan it's very bad news. Not only if you're arrested with a small piece of a joint. If you get arrested with cocaine, speed or marijuana in your pee, they make you do a pee test, they can make you go to prison for six months and you're never allowed to go back to Japan after your sentence.
So, I thought, if you want to have a young, cool drug dealer being in danger, Tokyo is perfect, because if he's taking 20 pills to a friend and he's arrested, that could mean four years of jail. So, the tension's much higher.
If you got arrested in England with 20 pills of ecstasy, nothing much is going to happen to you. I didn't want the guy to be a big drug dealer. I just wanted him to try to survive on the small money he can take from his friends and his friend's mother. At a point in the script, it was said that he was a DJ, so maybe he got a little money from there, but the guy has problems providing for himself.
A lot's been talked about the visual aspect of the film, but the audio side is also fascinating. It reminds me - and I know you used Coil on the soundtrack - of John Balance's Time Machines project, in that there's this throbbing, pulsating stereo effect that -
What's that?
You know the band Coil? He [the band's late founding member John Balance] did an album called Time Machines -
I don't know that record. I used another one called ANS, where he used a Russian synthesiser. And I met him, he came to Paris and not only did he give me the rights to use that record ANS, but he also called his ex-partners in Throbbing Gristle and said, "Gaspar wants to put Hamburger Lady in a scene of his movie."And he convinced the other partners in Throbbing Gristle to let me use the music for my film.
His music for Coil and Throbbing Gristle was trippy. Sometimes just a drum can put you in a hypnotic state, and there aren't many musicians that play with drums and frequencies that can hypnotise you, and put you in a dream state.
How important do you think the audio is in achieving that, with the strobing and pulsating that you have all the way through? It almost creates an altered state in itself.
Whatever helps to make the audience feel stoned was good. [laughs]
In fact, some people, when they came out of a screening, because there are no end credits, said it was just like being on a rollercoaster. And it's like zoom! And whoosh! And people come down shaking from the screening room, and say "what a trip!" and it takes them five minutes or so before they say anything else!
Gaspar Noé, thank you very much.
What did you guys think of this movie? The one part I didn't get was when Alex and Linda are in the taxi and they are about to get in a crash but it seems they never do. I assumed that it was probably just her having a sort of flash back to the accident when her parents died. Beside that this movie all strung together beautifully, and I loved the mind blowing meanings laced into it.
 
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skatealex2
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Registered: 07/04/08
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Re: Enter The Void [Re: 28064212]
#14231039 - 04/03/11 12:49 PM (12 years, 9 months ago) |
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never seen it, but i think i will watch it today!
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agonzalez64
Stranger


Registered: 10/26/10
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Re: Enter The Void [Re: 28064212]
#14231041 - 04/03/11 12:50 PM (12 years, 9 months ago) |
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I went to see this movie with my gf in NYC IFC theater, we came out crying and pretty much minded fucked. Its an intense movie when watch cinema styled. Graphics are amazing, although i never done dmt i think they did a good job at portraying the DMT geometrical visions for the lay man.
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crazyboy25
International man of mystery

Registered: 05/31/09
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It was fucking stupid. I got 2/3rds of the way through it and I couldn't finish it. Really long shots of run down Tokyo apartment complexes, very little in the way of exciting or interesting plot events, and the whole thing looked like it was shot in sepia/graytone.
-------------------- "Life without freedom is not life... freedom is life."
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Belac
Pokemaniac


Registered: 01/14/10
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I'll never move to Tokyo after watching that movie haha. But the director is a crazy motherfucking thats for sure, VBS did a documentary thing on him which was pretty interesting.
Heres the link if you want to watch it: http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-film--2/gaspar-noe-part-1-of-3--2
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Shroomism
Space Travellin



Registered: 02/13/00
Posts: 66,015
Loc: 9th Dimension
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Re: Enter The Void [Re: 28064212] 1
#14231083 - 04/03/11 01:03 PM (12 years, 9 months ago) |
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I loved it. Best movie to come out of hollywood in years. It might even be one of my new favorites.
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Belac
Pokemaniac


Registered: 01/14/10
Posts: 1,799
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It didn't come out of Hollywood.
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Shroomism
Space Travellin



Registered: 02/13/00
Posts: 66,015
Loc: 9th Dimension
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Re: Enter The Void [Re: Belac]
#14231111 - 04/03/11 01:11 PM (12 years, 9 months ago) |
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Used as a term not a noun. Meaning the movie industry.
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Electric Sheep
Stranger


Registered: 02/04/10
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One of my favorite movies since I saw it a couple months ago. It is a masterpiece imo... and definitely interesting watching for anyone who is interested in psychedelic substances. I can see how people have criticisms that it is boring or whatever, but this is the type of movie that rewards you for sitting through it I felt. My suggestion would be to roll up some joints, turn out the lights, and be ready for a 2+ hour mindfuck. I would not however suggest tripping to it, becuase the subject matter gets dark, and it gets dark fast - whether or not the movie ends on a dark or uplifting note is really up to the subjective viewer and what they get out of the movie though I thought.
Either way, this film is a work of art, just from a visual/film-making perspective, when you include the story-line it becomes a masterpiece
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uber_aj
Goodbye Shroomery!



Registered: 11/13/05
Posts: 4,486
Loc: Much love to you all
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Quote:
crazyboy25 said: It was fucking stupid. I got 2/3rds of the way through it and I couldn't finish it. Really long shots of run down Tokyo apartment complexes, very little in the way of exciting or interesting plot events, and the whole thing looked like it was shot in sepia/graytone.
Agreed.
It was nothing but another worst-case-scenario drug movie, only with psychedelics and spirituality instead of cocaine and thangs.
I do give it credit for approaching some taboo parts of human nature that don't usually get much screen time, and the nudity was great, but it didn't make up for the high school plot line, shoddy acting and drag-on repeat scenes. If they cut an hour out of it I'd give it a 7/10 instead of a 5.
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sam420
CertifiedReptilianOverlord



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Re: Enter The Void [Re: Belac]
#14231278 - 04/03/11 01:58 PM (12 years, 9 months ago) |
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Quote:
Belac said: I'll never move to Tokyo after watching that movie haha. But the director is a crazy motherfucking thats for sure, VBS did a documentary thing on him which was pretty interesting.
Heres the link if you want to watch it: http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-film--2/gaspar-noe-part-1-of-3--2
I enjoyed that documentary, thanks
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i'm a spy huntin rap dinosaur from the future
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skatealex2
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Re: Enter The Void [Re: sam420]
#14265343 - 04/10/11 01:54 AM (12 years, 9 months ago) |
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it def could've been an hour shorter but im just finishing it and its pretty crazy. i like the psychedelic usage in this.
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tk3
wobbly zombie

Registered: 02/22/11
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absolutely wonderful in many senses.
Should be edited down. It gets boring after the first hour because it doesn't go anywhere.
I'm kind of glad though, 45min into it i thought finishing the movie would totally destroy my brain... it didn't though.
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bbl337
genetic material is Ar based



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Re: Enter The Void [Re: tk3]
#14266899 - 04/10/11 12:42 PM (12 years, 9 months ago) |
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I watched the movie with my girlfriend and both of us found it... kinda meh. Don't see what all the fuss is about. Yes, it did do things that no other movie has done, but it didn't do them that well.
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28064212
Special Agent Dale Cooper




Registered: 01/15/11
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Quote:
skatealex2 said: it def could've been an hour shorter but im just finishing it and its pretty crazy. i like the psychedelic usage in this.
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shasha
aspiring sadhu


Registered: 03/29/09
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Re: Enter The Void [Re: 28064212]
#14402924 - 05/04/11 11:29 PM (12 years, 8 months ago) |
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i smoked some weed, ate just over a gram of booms, and watched the entire movie (extended version) straight through by myself a few days ago...let's just say the wife probably couldn't handle this one...
intense as fuck - but so fucking worth it. absolutely incredible movie. it truly is an experience, not a viewing, if you have the right mindset and the patience. having that little bit of psilocin in the system definitely kept me engaged...and only afterward did i find out that gaspar noe's first inspiration for this movie was after tripping on shrooms during a movie as a young'n!
karmic coincidence indeed... 
-------------------- "Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration...that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather." - Bill Hicks
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KingEmblem
Cannaisseur



Registered: 03/27/10
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Quote:
crazyboy25 said: It was fucking stupid. I got 2/3rds of the way through it and I couldn't finish it. Really long shots of run down Tokyo apartment complexes, very little in the way of exciting or interesting plot events, and the whole thing looked like it was shot in sepia/graytone.
I am somewhat on the same boat as this post. Watched it with two other people, stoned as tits on 4/20. We were pretty interested at first but stopped it with about half an hour left, although we stopped paying attention 10-20 minutes before that. It was pretty boring, and I thought it used a bit too much sympathy/sentimentality. Plus, the main character was pretty stupid to get himself shot the way he did (this is early on, not a spoiler).
I'm gonna have to watch it again by myself, really focus and maybe it will have some mindblown meaning. But maybe not...I might not ever get around to it.
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Acaterpillar
A little mad...



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I haven't read the actual Tibetan book of the dead, but apparently the movie follows a pretty close representation of death as the book portrays.
There was a thread on the shroomery earlier with a member saying he wouldn't have understood the movie had he not read the book of the dead beforehand.
-------------------- Aaa...E I O Uuu...A E I O Uuu..A E I O uh Uuu.. *Cough* *Cough* Ooo...U E I O Aaa...U E I Aaa..A E I O Uuuuu... At first sight, The Perfection of Wisdom is bewildering, full of paradox and apparent irrationality.
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Greenvalley
PRS



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I really want to watch that movie, anybody know where I can watch it online?
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awakendone


Registered: 08/05/10
Posts: 824
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i'd go here and try a putlocker or sockshare link.
seriously though, i think this movie is waaaayyy overrated. it's complete garbage IMO
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