In 2002, director Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible created controversy in every big festival where it was screened – first in Cannes where it competed for the Palm d’Or, then in Toronto, and finally in Sundance. By the time it was released in US theaters in March 2003, almost 20 years ago, audiences were eager to see it because of a 9-minute scene with Monica Bellucci that tested the limits of tolerance by illustrating with unusual cruelty how sexual violence destroys lives.

Artistically though, the film also explored the boundaries of cinema, telling the story in reverse order, using low-frequency sound and hard-to-read credits. Noé, who left Argentina for France at age 12 when his famous father, a painter, had to flee the country, became the new enfant terrible of film, something he explored further in the many titles that followed. In 2019, he presented a new cut of Irreversible in Venice, told in chronological order, that could be seen as a completely new film. Titled Irreversible: Straight Cut, it will open theatrically in Los Angeles and New York on February 10. In some theaters, it will play along with the original version as a double feature. We spoke to Gaspar over Zoom about his infamous film.

Why did you feel the need to tell this story in chronological order?

Actually, the movie was shot in chronological order.  We shot the movie in the summer of 2001 with a three-page script. The three pages contained twelve scenes, each one was like a quarter of a page and they did not have dialogue. And then in the editing process of the original movie, I had put the twelve scenes in reverse order, which means when it was shown in Cannes in 2002, in competition, people were puzzled by its structure. It would start at the end of a terrible night and then it would go slowly to the beginning of the story, like twelve hours before. And when I did that cut and I wanted that movie to be in reverse, it was my director’s cut. And the producers said oh, but you should try and put all the scenes in the right order as you shot them. Back then the movies were edited physically from the negative, so I said no, I just want the movie to have one cut, so let’s cut it as it intended to be, in a reverse order. 

So we edited the movie that way, the movie was screened in Cannes and there was a scandal and then it was a commercial success, etc, etc. But two years ago, Studio Canal, who owns the old version and the rights of the movie, said we are going to do the remastering of the movie in 2K, do you want to check it?  I said, of course, I want to be in every single step of the remastering of my movie. I said, now that I have the digital plans for the movie, then it’s the right moment to put all the scenes in a chronological order and do a clockwise version or a straight cut as they called it. I didn’t expect it to work that well before trying it, so we decided that the movie should have its own existence and be shown in festivals as the straight cut. And also that the movie should be released in movie theaters and then on a Blu-Ray or DVD with the reverse cut and the new straight cut.

The results are very different: in one case it’s a tragedy because you know that everything is going to fail and the story where it is backwards tells you how everything failed. But now it’s a drama because you don’t know what the future is made of. And also, the new version is more clear about the events and about the psychology of the characters. I recognize the two versions as director’s cuts, but there is one that is reverse and the other one that is a straight cut.  I like them both and that’s why I like the idea that in some theaters both versions will be played. But this one, because there’s more empathy towards the characters in this version and because what happens is really terrible, the movie is more cruel than the original version.

The original cut to me is like a puzzle that you need to find out what’s going on as you go through the movie.  But in this case, you start with the beauty of this loving relationship and then you see how it gets destroyed by violence. So, to me, it felt like two different films.

Yeah and also the final point of the new version, it’s deep inside hell because everything goes wrong and the only survivor to the story is the aggressor, so it’s an ultimate feel-bad movie. The other one was not a feel-bad movie.

Do you think it’s important to watch it in a theater because you play with sound in a very specific way?

Yeah, in all my movies I play with sound. And some movies that you see with closeups of people talking, you can watch them on your laptop or on the big cinema screen, it doesn’t change much.  But if you want to see a movie like 2001 A Space Odyssey, you better see it in a movie theater, it doesn’t work on a laptop. And in my case, I also took advantage of some movie theaters, for example, you can use low frequencies of 12 Hertz or 16 Hertz and if the cinema has a subwoofer, it creates a kind of Sensurround effect, close to a pre-earthquake. And I enjoyed it, both in the old version and now in this new version, to have lots of low frequencies that on a psychological level scared the audience. When you hear low frequencies that you barely hear, it makes you feel like an earthquake is coming.

When you released the original Irreversible did you expect to create such a shock?

Yeah, when you make a movie, you know that art is just an imitation of life, that no one gets hurt, that no one gets insulted, that actions are being playful in front of the camera and the director is playful with his camera. So it’s all like not a joke, but it’s a game that everyone’s playing. And I remember for example, even when we were shooting the traumatic scene of the rape with Monica, between the takes she would say, oh, it didn’t look very real, and say, oh, people aren’t going to scream in the theaters, we want them to scream. And then we all felt like kids making a bad joke.

It took a while for you to film after that again.

The reason was mainly because after finishing Irreversible, I really wanted to start Into the Void, and that movie was a big budget with no famous actors, with a very experimental plot, so it was a very difficult movie to finance. Instead of accepting other projects, I stuck to my idea of shooting Into the Void as my third movie.  And finally, by a miracle, my producers found the money and we did in a very risky way how the movie was completed. And that movie could be made also because of the commercial success of Irreversible, but Into the Void was a commercial failure. Some successful movies come out and some don’t. Irreversible, I would never have expected it to become a commercial success and it was one, and I really expected Into the Void to be a commercial success and it was not. But that’s also part of the game of making movies. 

You went through some personal issues in the last couple of years. You almost died; your mother passed away. Do you think that you could do Irreversible today?

No. I wouldn’t be interested in doing it nowadays, but also it would be very complicated to portray those kinds of stories nowadays after everything that happened with the MeToo movement. The imitation of violence and imitation of sexuality in its most aggressive form has changed the habits, they have changed a lot, so I don’t think I could get this film financed nowadays. Also, from a personal perspective, I don’t think it would be the kind of movie that I want to do nowadays, but I don’t know, if I hadn’t done Irreversible, I wouldn’t be myself, it would be someone else. But I am not into shocking movies anymore.