On 29 December 2019, following several days of Christmas indulgence, Gaspar Noé felt an odd sensation in his head. When the ambulance arrived, he was told he’d had a brain haemorrhage; later, the doctors said he had a 50% chance of dying, a 35% chance of surviving with brain lesions, and a 15% chance of escaping unharmed. “I thought: ‘I mustn’t die,’” he says, “‘because it’s not very nice for everyone else to have to sort out all my stuff.’ So maybe my film poster collection saved me: they might have thrown out my Fritz Lang posters, because they don’t know what they’re worth.”
Just over two years later, grinning over a Zoom link (his handle: fritzlang), the Argentinian director, who moved to France at 13, is fully recovered. But he could have had brain damage – something that was still on his mind when, in January last year, he was asked to write a proposal for a project to be filmed in lockdown. It led to a complete departure for the serially offensive bad boy of modern French cinema: his new film Vortex, a sombre and decidedly unprovocative look at dementia and ageing. Even more surprising is that it stars none other than Italian horror maestro Dario Argento. The director responsible for such ultraviolent classics as Suspiria and Deep Red is also on our Zoom call, from his home in Rome.
