French Enfant terrible Gaspar Noé ‘s latest movie, Enter the Void, is a sumptuous, psychedelic odyssey through the post-death experiences of its drug dealer anti-hero, Oscar. After smoking DMT (Dimethyltryptamine – a naturally occuring, powerfully immersive psychedelic) in the opening moments of the film, Oscar gets himself shot by police during a bust and bleeds out in a filthy Tokyo club toilet.

What follows is by turns sublime, visceral, shocking, darkly humorous and excruciatingly drawn-out. Through a looping and fractured narrative, we follow Oscar’s disincarnate first-person gaze through a post-corporeal reality, shimmering and strobing with recollections of his past and nightmarish projections of the fates befalling his sister and friends.

Produced in the pineal gland and released in a flood through the human brain in its mortal throes, DMT is thought by some to cause near-death experiences. On the eve of Enter the Void being released on DVD, Noé and Pinchbeck compare their experiences of DMT’s reality altering effects.

GASPAR NOÉ: We met before in New York City, do you remember Daniel?
DANIEL PINCHBECK: I do, of course, at our little collective hardware Bowery underground corners.
GN: And since, I’ve seen the documentary you did with Jodorowski, which was fun. Actually the first time I heard of you was when I read your book Breaking Open The Head. Among the description of all the other substances in that book, the description of how ayahuasca or DMT affects your mind was the best description I had ever read. Those visions of cities from above, made of neon lights etc. At one point I tried to rewrite my script according to your descriptions but in the end I didn’t. I thought that it was good to have in mind that I was not the only one to have visions of towers, of strange buildings when I was on DMT.
DP: What for you is beyond the visual aspects of it, what’s the value or philosophical meaning of these psychedelic experiences for you?
GN: The toughest part, or maybe the most essential or useful part, is when you start doubting yourself and your ego. You don’t know what the fuck you are, what the fuck a human is, humankind, history, time and sometimes when you get close to those questions you can faint.
DP: You can faint?
GN: Yeah, I fainted two or three times. Then when you wake up you know that your head went too far. When you come back to reality it takes you some time to understand that you’re on a planet, that you’re a kind of mammal, maybe human, maybe with a name and somewhere in history. But I remember that when it goes that far I see [makes a whooshing noise] flashing lights just before I faint.
DP: Yeah, I have actually grown really fond of that experience. It’s like you get a chance to experience yourself as consciousness without your name and identify and that stuff. It’s like a great vacation.
GN: Yeah but it didn’t happen to me to the point where it happened to you, because in your book the scariest chapter was the one on DPT [Dipropyltryptamine, an artificially produced hallucinogenic drug]. For sure I’ll never try DPT after reading your description. But over time DMT can get close to that experience you describe where everything turns, not evil but everything turns alien, and you feel you’re like possessed by some alien, another form of life. You can get into zones where you almost think like a robot or like an ant, without having any emotional attachment to the people you like the most. It’s weird because you reconsider your life and things that really seem essential to you, you can consider them in the coldest way you could imagine.
DP: In the film there’s an opening onto ideas around reincarnation. Is that something you take seriously, or was it more of a stylistic trope?
GN: No, I believe in the spell of these substances, but I don’t believe in reincarnation at all. Actually in the movie, if you watch closely, the woman giving birth at the end is not Linda, the girl played by Paz, it’s the mother that you see at the beginning of the movie. So actually he’s just going back to the starting point or he’s just remembering his own birth.
DP: So your perspective around say spirituality or the after-death realm, is that really nothing happens? Even though you’ve had these visionary experiences in altered states, you would consider them more as hallucinations?
GN: Err, things happen, but I think your consciousness dies, when you die. It’s weird how people come to see very different things on ayahuasca.
DP: There are obviously all sorts of different stuff people see, but on the other hand there are overarching similarities. There’s a book that an Israeli psychoanalyst, Benny Shanon, wrote on the phenomenology of the ‘ayahuasca experience’, correlating the types of imagery that people saw across thousands and thousands of different sessions. He found a lot of continuity and ended up arguing for the Jungian model of psychic archetypes.
GN: Yeah. What are the visions that come all the time?
DP: Incan pyramids with Mardi Gras futuristic cities, different types of spirits, praying mantises. A lot of people see alien insects, that are often benevolent, but doing psychic surgery on you. I had that experience the last time I worked with ayahuasca a few months ago. All these cosmic alien insects gathered around me and were working on my heart and my organs.
GN: When I was in Peru I had “dark ayahuasca” or “black ayahuasca.” I don’t know if it had Datura inside but it was like a trip to hell. I saw some cartoonish spiders, [shudders] floating towards me as if they were dolphins and then… pfff… everything turned really, really dark. It was a dark trip. Sometimes you see visions of flying saucers from the inside, like at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
DP: When you begin to get into different ayahuasca traditions, the shamen are able to bring in different frequencies through the songs they sing. I just worked with the Sequoyah from Ecuador and they bring a certain level of beings to their ceremonies and that’s a very different experience than the Santo Daime, which is a Christian based religion in Brazil, where you seem to encounter a totally different class of spirit entities. I really feel that there’s a huge amount still to discover and learn with this stuff, that we’re really just at the starting point.

Enter the Void is out on DVD on April 25.

Words: William Alderwick

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #26, April/May 2011

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Its owner, wearing only a studded leather bra, is standing in front of a full length mirror, gazing at herself and languorously shifting from side to side while a kneeling assistant inches a pair of rhinestone knickers up her ankles.

Knickers now on (some very un-cheap merchandise, naturally), Paz sashays on to the set, shrugs off her bathrobe and is instantly working it like a 50s pin-up, slowly writhing her coltish limbs like she’s moving in honey. There’s an 80s rock soundtrack playing in the background and she frequently shouts: “I love this song!”

There’s a sizeable team of people watching Paz – about a dozen – and they all seem pretty dumbstruck. Stylist Emilie Kareh, gazing at her from the sidelines, purrs that it’s so easy to dress her because, “she knows how to mooooove”, while photographer Danielle Levitt earlier describes her to me as, “a very charismatic and energising creator.” She adds, perhaps just a touch archly, that, “she does ‘fantasy world’ very well.”

At one point though, Paz seems to feel there isn’t sufficient adulation in the room. Her brow suddenly furrows, she juts her lips into a pout and calls plaintively to the camera, “I need you to be in love with me! Aren’t you in love with me?” It’s a little ridiculous, but not without its own strange pathos – hilarious and heartbreaking all at once. Her astrologer has told her that she was “definitely” Marilyn Monroe in a past life.

Paz was born in SoHo in New York in 1984, the child of Iñigo de la Huerta, a Spanish rancher and Duke of Mandas and Villanueva, and Judith Bruce, a policy analyst for women’s issues in developing countries. It was, by all accounts, a fairly unorthodox childhood.

“When I was a little girl I was quite shy, and my mum took me to acting classes aged four so I could open up. It really became my outlet for me to express myself. That and painting; I paint a lot. There was a lot of drama in my household, so I had a lot of anger at times – especially when I was a teenager.”

In fact, she was kicked out of the sixth grade for breaking a chair over a girl’s head, having been bullied for her skinniness. She went on to St Ann’s school in Brooklyn, where she befriended Zac Posen – she still models for him. It was while at school that she landed her first film role, playing Mary Agnes in The Cider House Rules after she was discovered on a SoHo street.

Jim Jarmusch cast Paz in Limits of Control, in 2009, having written the character of “Nude” especially for her. A character who – you guessed it – isn’t a great wearer of clothes, except for a transparent plastic raincoat, that is. Jarmusch has said, “I always joke that it’s harder to get Paz to keep her clothes on than to take them off.”

A less charitable summation of her came from her mother, who supposedly described her as “Genghis Khan meets Marie Antoinette” in an interview for New York Magazine. When I raise this with Paz, the words are barely out of my mouth before she silences me with a waved hand.
“First of all the guy who wrote that article was an ex-boyfriend who was severely heartbroken and had a lot of ulterior motives so it’s not journalism. It’s against the law for an ex-boyfriend to interview you. So I learned from that experience. Always learning.”

And in terms of keeping private life private, there will probably even more learning to do now – after Boardwalk Empire and her captivating performance in Gaspar Noé’s psychedelic Enter the Void, her fame is going to spread a lot further than the Lower East Side.

She thinks the world would also be happier if everyone lightened up about sex: “I don’t really consider the nudity, it’s just like another costume. I approach it from an emotional space. That’s why it shocks me when people are like “`Oh, she’s nude!” – well what about the fact that I’m crying? Or I’m laughing? It’s an emotional scene. A lot of crazy things happen in the bedroom. Not just sex. Lovers quarrels.”

Is sex important to you?
“Love is,” she coos. “Love, baby, love. Love is really the most important thing. I can’t have sex with someone I’m not in love with. I still love every ex boyfriend I’ve ever had and I talk to them all the time.”

How would her ex-boyfriends describe her?
“Complicated? Fun? Umm. Passionate. Definitely passionate. I think they would say I’m passionate above all. I keep it honest. I don’t like games. And in my work, it really makes me feel things very deeply. I can get to places that I need to get.”

Styled moodily in black dress and plum-coloured lipstick, Paz turns away from the camera to “get into the right emotional space”. There are a few suppressed smirks. When she turns back a moment later though tears are running down her face.

She says she wants to “try everything” and be thought of as, “somebody who gets to people, whether good or bad. I mean, if you get to someone, it means you’re making something in them aliven and awaken and make them question themselves. So I’d like to be a provocative actress. I really know I’m capable of everything and I have so much I want to play … a lot I want to do.”

What sort of thing? She thinks for a moment.
“I would love to do some Victorian like …” she searches for the term.

Costume drama?
“Yeah, costume drama.” Paz in bonnet and crinoline – that really would be a shock.

Photography: Danielle Levitt
Fashion: Emilie Kareh
Words: Hermonie Hoby

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland Issue 25, Feb/March 2011

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