You’ve said before that you don’t think that “provocateur” is a very good descriptor of you, but it’s clear that you obviously want to provoke the audience. How would you explain the difference?
It’s funny to see people react to movies. Like in African countries, when they show movies to the audience in which a woman cheats on her husband people are throwing stones at the screen. And then if they meet the actors in the street then they throw stones at them. But in our Western side of the planet, people know that a movie’s a movie and that it’s fake and nothing happens for real. So, sometimes you have to push the envelope to get some kind of emotion from the audience. Even people who were shocked by the rape scene [in Noe’s 2003 film, Irreversible], they always knew that nothing really happened to Monica. There are people who see the movie, they like the car crash scene, but they know that the kids weren’t damaged and no one died. We’re just pretending. You lie to yourself by pretending that what’s going on on the screen is true.

Why shoot in Tokyo?
It was really big fun to shoot in Tokyo. Big, big fun. I love the city. It’s full of neon lights that are very psychedelic, very trippy. So, what are the best cities to [set] a psychedelic movie? Las Vegas, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. Las Vegas is an obnoxious city — it would never fit with the story. And I have been to Tokyo twenty times. I love their cinema. I was very happy to spend six months there setting up and shooting the movie.