Time Bandit: Gaspar Noé on “Irreversible: Straight Cut”

“Irreversible: Straight Cut”

Gaspar Noé’s brutal, crushing punishing-of-the-innocent “Irreversible,” came out in 2002. A couple (Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel, married at the time) are having a great day; separated, she’s met with brutal, savage violence, in an extended scene of assault, and when he finds out, himself turns to violence. Among the notable elements of that improvised-from-outline drama was its time scheme: beginning on chaotic violence and regressing backward in time to a bucolic and hopeful afternoon.

Twenty-plus years later, we have the American release of “Irreversible: Straight Cut,” which twists the story into a form that was never planned: linear, chronological order. “Putting the scenes in clockwise order makes it easier to identify with the characters and understand the tale unfolding,” the fifty-nine-year-old Argentine-born director says. “The same story is no longer a tragedy, this time it is a drama that brings out the psychology of the characters and the mechanisms that lead some of them to a murderous barbarity. While ‘Irreversible’ has sometimes been wrongly perceived as a ‘rape and revenge’ B movie, here the deadly outcome is all the more depressing. The film can be more easily seen as a fable on the contagion of barbarity and the command of the reptilian brain over the rational mind.”

“Irreversible: Straight Cut”

Noé and I spoke about these changes via Zoom right before Valentine’s Day.

Okay. So this is “Irreversible: Straight Cut,” the restored, digital version from 2022 is the true, the only “Director’s Cut.”

No, this is the director’s recut because there’s not a producer’s cut and director’s cut. There is a director’s original cut and director’s original recut. I like that it’s like some piano players can play twice, the same piece of music twice, and make it sound different. 

I didn’t add anything to the original cut. I just put the scenes in the right order and I cut a little bit the links between the scenes. But I didn’t pull out any dialogue, I didn’t pull out any action. I’m very proud of the results. That’s why when I saw this new cut, that supposedly was made to be put as an extra on the DVD, I thought it was so strong that I really wanted it to be released theatrically as the alternative cut of the original “Irreversible.” So, exactly. I could say it should be called the reverse cut and the straight cut. But if you call the old version the reverse cut, it would be even more complicated. So there is the original cut… And the straight cut. 

This is simpler, both chronologically and psychologically?

Yes, this movie is far more simple to understand. I don’t think it’s going to reach a wider audience because of the fact that the story told is the right sense, I mean clockwise, makes it more cruel, because you see that everything’s falling down, falling down. This “straight cut” would never have been financed because it’s the ultimate feel-bad movie. It’s not a feel-good movie, it’s the opposite!

The greatest thing about the movie to me has always been the ending—beginning—of the couple happy in the bright room, in the sanctity of the bed, the star child on the poster looking over them. And of course, the park, where the title of the book she’s reading announces or reminds, “An Experiment with Time.” So you had a kind of melancholic ending that would show you how sweet life can be before the drama starts in this case everything goes wrong and wrong and wrong.

I’m very happy that I could do this cut and I’m proud also of the fact that both cuts are equally strong, each in a very different way, but now I have a movie that has two faces like the moon has two faces, the one we know and the one we don’t know. 

Flip sides of a record.

Yes, some records have a vocal version on side A, and an instrumental version on side B. Now the clear version is available also, so you can really understand what was going on in the minds of the characters during the whole process. This version is a more actor’s movie and probably a bit less of a director’s movie because you’re much more with the characters. 

Two versions of the same blues song, you have to decide which one is more sad and this one, as you just said, this one is really sad. And which no one would finance.

Yeah, especially the movie was shot twenty years ago and was already almost impossible to produce such a movie, but nowadays it would be absolutely impossible to get the financing for this kind of dysfunctional rape and revenge movie. 

I know you worked from an outline, but how long did you have to shoot?

I had six weeks to shoot the movie. Also, the movie was properly financed because I had the most glorious couple of French cinema, like Americans had Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. In France at that time. Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel were the ultimate dream couple. So when they said yes to do this movie, we had the right amount to shoot the movie on Super 16, over this period of six weeks. And we shot everything chronologically! So that means that the new edit that is going to be released now in the States is very close to what we saw as we made it. It’s like the audience now feels the psychology that the actors were receiving as they were acting in it.

The audience that will see this version now, it’s also the same as the actors, they know it’s going to be emotionally extreme. 

Yeah. Also, because this new version starts with Monica Bellucci, and she’s the main character for the first fifty minutes, she becomes the lead, she becomes the center of the movie, which was not the case in the previous edit, in which she appears towards the end of the movie, in which Vincent Cassel’s character seems heroic. In this movie, really, the way you read their characters makes you think that it’s the second character who’s heroic and Vincent Cassel is just behaving as a monkey. 

“Irreversible: Straight Cut”

Yeah, it’s like she’s not so much acted upon as could be argued about the original cut. 

She is not the tragic pawn, and now he’s the monkey.

Tell me about when you came upon that Korean DVD cut.

I always ask the foreign distributors to send me the posters. If there is a press kit, certainly the press kit, and to send me a DVD, because I think of the day the rights will have expired. And someone in Korea will want to rebuy the movie. It’s good to get hold of the DVDs from all over the planet. But when I got the Korean one, [I found that] without my permission, they had added as an extra, this badly made edit in a clockwise order. And when I watched that, I said, “Oh, it’s horribly made!” So I stopped after thirty minutes. But I always thought that one day, I would try to do this clockwise cut. When the owners of  “Irreversible” asked me to supervise the digital remastering of the movie, I said, okay, okay, I’ll do it. I wanted it to be perfect. But also I took the material and I put it into my editing facility. And I saw it was a perfect moment to try that straight cut. And the result was so strong that then I wanted to release it theatrically and to put it in film festivals like Venice. It’s finally being released in the States, but it was already released in France, in Russia, in Japan, many years ago, two or three years ago. 

Robert Altman always liked to claim that he never learned anything except from a bad movie. And in this case, you were inspired by your own movie that someone else had messed up. 

Yes.

You changed the end title, which is really interesting. “Time destroys everything” (“Le temps detruit tout”) becomes “Time reveals everything” ( “Le temps révèle tout”). 

When you write “time reveals all things,” or everything, the subtext of that sentence is that the future is already written, because if it reveals all things, is that there is something about fate in that sentence. That is a way of turning this dramatic version into a tragedy. The previous version was a tragedy because you would know how it would end and then the whole game was to see how everything unfolded backwards. So yeah, I wanted to change the sentence because in this case, it’s evident that time destroyed everything during the process of the ninety minutes of the movie, but also to add this idea that everything was pre-written.

There is another element in the movies, that she’s reading a book about premonitions and she has a dream about a tunnel being broken into and she doesn’t read her own premonition. She had a glimpse of things to come, but she didn’t recognize them. The title of the book that she’s reading in the park, [JW Dunne’s] “An Experiment With Time” now is an experiment and getting rid of the experiment with time! That book was written in 1927, and Dunne was noting all his dreams every morning and then he was trying to compare the surprises he would have during the day with his dreams of the previous night. He was noting that the coincidences were too many, there was some kind of pre-perception of the future during the sleep. 

Did he make the case that that was for everyone? Are you using the observed memory itself? Or did he think that… 

He built a whole series about how the brain disconnects from the arrow of time when you’re sleeping, and what you’re dreaming. 

“Irreversible: Straight Cut”

Bellucci and Cassel like this version.

Oh yeah, especially Monica. She was excited. When I told her, “Hey Monica, I have a surprise for you. I just re-edited the movie. You know, a straight cut. After she saw it, she said, “Oh, let’s show it in Venice or in Canada, let’s make it happen.” So yeah, she was extremely happy. I wouldn’t say the movie had a second life, but the movie had a dream, rather, that was just being born.

The flip-side metaphor must be pretty indicative of how an actor would accommodate both versions in their mind. 

I would say that the other cut was the experimental one because of its time structure. And this one is very simple. So it would feel like if the success of a song was the side A with its version, and then you put the very clear song on the side B. For some people it’s stronger. Since I released this version, some people tell me they prefer the previous one. And some people tell me, I prefer this one. And I say, “I know, it’s just like two kids.” I like them both. 

The events in both versions are exactly the same, the dynamics are the same. I didn’t change the text, I just reversed the order. But the result also makes you feel a very opposite kind of empathy toward the characters. Most people in this version dislike Vincent Cassel’s character, but they like the other character of Albert Dupontel, who seems heroic, but in the previous version, because the movie would start with him, killing someone, you would see him as a monster during the whole movie. But in this case, you understand it’s a good guy, who at the end just loses his mind and commits an act of violence. 

Avenging angel versus avenging demon.

Yeah. 

You have the split-screen in your recent “Vortex” (2021) but the emotions of that drama are so, so direct, and the split-screen device simply makes the dilemma of the aging couple even more claustrophobic, a kind of sadness about how they’re becoming unmoored from each other’s consciousness. But that is very simple compared to a lot of things you’ve done. Are you more attracted to simplicity, to emotional directness these days?

No, for example, I did a movie, “Love” (2015), in 3-D, which means you have to watch with your right eye and your left eye, the same image and that then is composed into 3-D. Then I did a movie with a triple screen called “Lux Æterna’ (2019) then I made that movie with a double screen with two characters. I think it’s part of the same kind of playfulness to do a movie with two cuts in both ways [chronologically]. Some directors are good for playing with form, but most people just follow the usual way of telling stories. 

It’s like, look, it’s like when the amateur photographer is saying, look, look into the camera, we’re making a movie. When you were editing the re-edit, did you ever have a point that you have the different versions on multiple screens? 

Yes, I had to put on the two screens with this version and the other one just to transfer the subtitles from the old version. I had to get the English subtitles from the other version. So one screen was going one way and the other screen was going the other way. And finally I managed to synchronize all the subtitles. 

So you’re the only person, as the editor, the only person who witnessed yet another version!

Yeah, but it could be fun to play both movies on two screens. There would be some time lag because this one is five minutes shorter. 

The temptation with follow-on cuts seems to be everyone wants to add so much, but to make things tighter is like a rare thing. 

Yes, I know that there’s always a big discussion which is the best version of “Apocalypse Now.” And most people like the original version better than the two following cuts—

Which do you like? 

I like… Usually it’s the first version that impresses you the most because then you know what you’re gonna get. And of course, I don’t know concerning “Apocalypse Now” now, but for sure my favorite version of “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind” is the first cut. 

Sometimes there are versions that are cut for censorship reasons. I like better the uncut version of “Natural Born Killers” or I like better the full version of “JFK.” All the strong elements that were problematic are now there in the final version. A lot of times we see films later, we see them in a different way. 

I know which new version of an old movie really impressed me. The 3-D, Blu-ray version of “The Wizard of Oz.” There was a flat movie and they put it in 3-D and it looked so good. I dream of seeing the old “King Kong” in 3-D on my player!

“Irreversible: Straight Cut” opens Friday, February 24 at Alamo Drafthouse Wrigleyville.