American Cinematographer - October 2010 - 22

Above: A single bare bulb illuminates Oscar’s POV of his own body. Right: Oscar glimpses himself in the bathroom mirror, the film’s only close shot of his face.

can become a little gaudy. I wanted us to stay in a restrained color palette — the range is more or less between purple and orange or yellow. We tried to keep a unity to the colors.” Occasionally going to fluorescent green, he adds, “was a way of allowing you to rediscover the color that the rest of the film is bathed in. It’s good to put in another color; otherwise, your eye does a sort of white-balance so that you don’t see the colors anymore.” The opening of Enter the Void, before Oscar’s death, was shot in Super 35mm, with an Arricam Lite and Arri Master Primes, and the rest of the film was shot in Super 16mm with an Aaton XTR-Prod and Zeiss Ultra 16 primes. Noé explains that the idea was to heighten the visual realism when Oscar is alive. He notes, however, that the 16mm was so good that it was sometimes difficult to see the difference, and grain was therefore added to some scenes
22 October 2010

in post. (The extensive visual-effects work, including selective defocusing of many scenes, was supervised by Pierre Buffin at Buf Compagnie, a co-producer of the film.) Debie shot most of the film wide open, at T1.3. “When you’re using small bulbs, like we were, you have to do that,” he says. “We didn’t add any lighting to the Tokyo streets at night. I’d just do a little stop change if I saw a light that was too bright. I preferred to underexpose to keep some detail in the highlights.” Most of the movie was shot with a 9.5mm lens in Super 16; a 16mm lens was often used for the 35mm opening. To shoot the astral view, the filmmakers used a Pegasus or a Technocrane, depending on the room they had on set. Noé was the camera operator for most of the film, with Debie doing some of the handheld work. “Operating was the best place to be in order to have the control of what would end up on
American Cinematographer

the editing table,” explains Noé. Irreversible is made up of a reverse chronology of 13 one-shot scenes, and Enter the Void also contains many such uninterrupted scenes. “I had this movie in mind when I shot Irreversible, so both movies are filmed in similar ways,” says Noé. “I decided to shoot one-shot scenes because I wanted the whole trip to look like one continuous movement of the mind.” The director confesses to cheating a couple of times when he needed to use different portions of different takes. For example, when Linda learns that her brother has died, Noé had the image blurred so as to hide a dissolve to another take. In another scene, the movements from two cranes, one swooping up the façade of a nightclub and the other coming down on the other side of the building, were blended to create the illusion of a single shot. “I try to come home with 10 or 15 takes that are very different,” says Noé. “At the editing table, I exclude all those that don’t work. Sometimes you hesitate between two or three very different possibilities. Sometimes you end up choosing the scene according to the emotion of the previous scene. It’s like seating people at a dinner: it depends on who is in the next chair. You can also notice when you go to the editing room that the scene has gone very far from what you initially intended, but mostly that’s a good thing, because it’s like real life coming in.” “One of Gaspar’s great qualities is that he pushes you to experiment,” observes Debie. “If, for whatever reason, something doesn’t work out as he hoped, he will never reproach you. He tells you, ‘Let’s try it, and if it’s not good, tomorrow we’ll do something else.’ That allows you to take a lot of risks. He is searching, and he therefore pushes others to do the same.”

TECHNICAL SPECS
2.40:1 Super 16mm and Super 35mm Aaton XTR-Prod; Arricam Lite Zeiss and Arri lenses Kodak Vision3 250D 7207/5207, 500T 7219/5219 Digital Intermediate Printed on Kodak Vision 2383

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American Cinematographer - October 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - October 2010