“High Life” is director Claire Denis’ twisted, kinky version of a deep space opera. A film set beyond our solar system, “High Life” centers on Monte (Robert Pattinson) and his infant daughter Willow who survives together aboard a spacecraft, in complete isolation of the nothingness around them. Monte fathered the girl back when the spacecraft had 7 death row inmates onboard who were sent up to space, as guinea pigs, to explore the possibilities of black holes. Now only Monte and Willow are left. What happened? Through flashbacks, we get to see the moral and ethical downfall that occurred which culminated with just Monte and Willow being the sole survivors.
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“High Life” is Denis’ second-only English-language film, and her only one set in space. The screenplay she wrote, with Jean-Pol Fargeau, has specific imagery meant to be accentuated by Yorick Le Saux’s elegantly simple cinematography and the too-subtle-you-might-miss-it brilliance of Stuart Staples’ hypnotic score. In “High Life” space is a prison, a never-ending void that has limited possibilities for the mind, despite the unlimited abyss it is set in.
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Denis, a formidable filmmaker that can easily stand with any of the greats from the last 30 years, has shown remarkable resilience in her career to never conform to the norm. She’s an everlasting troubadour, walking the high-wire of creative risk-taking with each movie she makes. I spoke to her about “High Life,” that infamous fuckbox, and her Robert Pattinson crush. And note: they are planning on working together again, but she’s mostly tight-lipped on details.
I’ve seen “High Life” twice now and it really feels like a hybrid of genres, it’s not just sci-fi, it feels incredibly claustrophobic to the point where it could very much be defined a prison movie but without the escape.
Of course. It’s also a movie about horny people. Sexuality, when we’re in prison, is an immensely important thing.
And this wonderful machine that Juliette Binoche’s character uses in the film.
The fuckbox!
The fuckbox!
We can find similar concoctions in sex shops, so I imagined it in a rather simple way. It was practical and very erotic.
It turns into one of the most natural and beautiful moments of the film.
Yes, because Juliette understood. She understood that I put in that scene, when she uses the machine to pleasure herself, immense desperation.
Desperation can be found, quite frankly, all over this film.
Yes, but there are also moments of unequivocal love as well. If desperation would have won at the end, then everybody would have just killed themselves and we wouldn’t have a single character left by the end of it. Robert Pattinson’s character stays for the baby.
There isn’t anything more human than that. Taking care of a newborn, parenting it, it’s in our DNA.
When we feel responsible for someone then we become a better person. Take me for example, or anybody else really, having a cat or a dog or a bird, having a pet is an incredibly humble experience because it makes you a better person, because there’s somebody depending on you. It gives you a reason and urges you to live. Even a little green plant can be deemed that kind of responsibility.
I remember my grandmother, who lived a rather isolated life alone in her final years, had a plant that she truly grew attached to. Even on her deathbed, she would ask us how her plant was doing, it became a sort of responsibility and, as you say, a reason to live for her.
It’s normal. It’s not like we have a vital willingness to live. We already know we are not super-humans, we are not immortal, we know very well that there are insurmountable pains. Tell me about a human being that hasn’t thought about his or her death, there isn’t such a person.
And so, Dr. Dibs, in a way, does play God, or even a sort of Mother Nature, to the inmates in this movie.
God, very much so, and filled with desperation herself. She’s a high-ranking criminal, having killed her husband and children, but now she wants to become a sort of creator of life, which is absurd.
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I also found her scenes with Pattinson’s Monte incredibly erotic.
She finds him very sexy. She can’t help but tell him. When we did the casting, I couldn’t help but think of the obvious, that any woman would have found Robert Pattinson attracted, found him seductive. To detract from that and not depict the obvious would have damaged the film. The beauty of a person, of course, comes from the physical, but there’s also that inner attractiveness that lures us in. Take, for example, Andre Benjamin, to me he’s the most beautiful of men, a sort of Dalai Lama with such a strong spirituality and force.
Benjamin, formerly from Outkast, a musician, poet and, of course, actor.
Andre3000. He doesn’t want to do Outkast anymore. I adore Andre Benjamin the actor and, yet, he originally didn’t want to be in the movie. I had to go all the way to Atlanta to convince him, I told him, “Please, I need you in my movie.” He then accepted my invitation.
His character can easily be forgotten, his scenes rather subdued, but when you ponder and wonder about him afterward he intensely stays in your head.
I think about him all the time. His majesty. Not to detract from Pattinson himself, who is such an intelligent and confident person.
Robert [Pattinson] said the same things about you.
There is a reason why my next movie will be with him. I just enjoy working with this man, an adaptation of “The Stars at Noon,” the novel from the late, brilliant writer Denis Johnson.
I don’t know where it was, but I had read that you had originally envisioned Philip Seymour Hoffman in the role of Monte.
When I was writing the screenplay, I wanted him to play the role, because I wanted a man that can show desperation on-screen. As we were writing the second draft of the screenplay I happened to catch Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master.” That scene where he dances, I had never seen a scene like that before, one which makes you feel so human and alive. It made me want to go inside the screen and tell him, “Please, take me in your arms.” When he died I can’t even talk about, too emotional, but when Robert came up to me and told me he wanted to be in the movie I thought he was too young. I was wrong.
The scenes between Monte and the baby could not have been easy to shoot.
That I can guarantee you. [laughs] I wanted to start the movie with those scenes because it says everything about humanity and the look on a parent’s face. If those scenes didn’t exist there would be no movie. It makes you understand who Montes is, what kind of man he is, a tender man.
Without those scenes, we might not know if he’s supposed to be the protagonist or antagonist.
Right, he would just be a depressed man that refuses to give his sperm.
Or as you’ve been calling it in interviews …
The holy liquid [laughs]
