High Life (2018)
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Spoilers (6)
Robert Pattinson already knew 13-month-old Scarlett Lindsey, who plays his baby daughter Willow: She is the daughter of his longtime friend, musician Sam Bradley, whom he knows since their school days together in London. Identical twin girls were initially cast, but as late as two days before filming was about to start, Pattinson couldn't bond with them, as they wouldn't stop crying as soon as he picked them up and got upset every time they were without their mother. He and Claire Denis felt not ready to shoot with them because the final film would have ended up entirely different. The night before filming began, Pattinson had the idea to ask his friend the last minute and so they flew in from London the next morning. She actually took her first steps ever infront of the camera while filming.
Claire Denis 's idea to create a baby in space came after she read about physicist Stephen Hawking, who raised this possibility for space exploration since the original humans would die on board before they reached the outer limits of the cosmos.
All passengers on the spaceship are wearing uniforms with the number 7 on it. According to Claire Denis, it implies that their spaceship is one in a series sent out to space, but each ship is used for different experimentation.
Claire Denis's first English language film after 13 feature films in French. She stated the reason she made it in English was that she simply couldn't imagine people speaking French in space, only either English or Russian.
Claire Denis had in mind the idea for the story since 2002. In 2014, Robert Pattinson heard about the project. Being a big cinephile and loving her previous films, he wanted to work with Denis since seeing White Material (2009) for the first time in 2010.
Being nervous about meeting Claire Denis for the first time, Robert Pattinson stated he studied Wikipedia articles on string theory and black holes to prepare for their first encounter and tried to rationalize a reason why his character would not age while travelling in deep space.
While shooting in Cologne, Claire Denis went back to Paris at the weekends to be by her mother's side who was dying in a hospital. Denis stated, that because of it, the final film maybe ended up a little bit sadder than she intended it to be.
The script, which Claire Denis wrote with her longtime collaborator, screenwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau, was first written in French. It was rumored English novelist Zadie Smith worked on the English draft, but Denis didn't see eye to eye with her and ultimately rejected it, stating that, "My producer introduced me to her. I thought it would be great to work with her, but we don't have the same philosophy of life. She disliked my casting for the lead and she wanted to change the story. So I asked her, 'Tell me the story you want.' It was so different, it was so unsexy for me. Nothing against her, but she wanted the people of the ship to - she wanted them to return to Earth. 'Going home,' she kept telling me. I said, 'What the fuck do you mean, going home? There is no one alive there!' She also wanted to retitle the film to 'A New Life'. I really tried, honestly tried. But sometimes people, they have different perceptions of the world. I've read her books - and I know why: We are on the same planet, but not living the same life, for sure. So there was not even a draft."
Monte is imprisoned because he committed a murder back in his childhood. Claire Denis stated that his backstory is loosely based on the 1993 murder case of two-year old James Bulger, who was murdered by two just 10-year old boys who were found guilty and sentenced to 15 years, becoming the youngest convicted murderers of the 20th century.
The original idea of High Life was 'a man and his baby alone and so far lost in space with no point of return' and comes from the day Claire Denis joked to Vincent Gallo while promoting Trouble Every Day (2001): "You're so selfish and such a pain in the ass, that the only script I could write for you is alone in space, so the film will be only about you."
Claire Denis about the film: "The film for me, is not so much about sci-fi ... it's rather about ... tenderness in space. It's about trust, fidelity and sincerity. I know my films can be brutal and violent but this ... to me ... is one of the most heartwarming films I've ever made. It's about the bond of a father and his daughter in this spaceship and to me that's very emotionally powerful. It's important to show how people are feeling, even when they are brutal. But it's about despair and human tenderness... about love, despite everything."
Musician Stuart Staples composed much of the score before filming began. When they shot the F**kbox scene, Juliette Binoche acted with the music playing in the background to match her body movements.
Claire Denis confirmed that the graphic of the galaxy shown at 01:11 hours runtime after Dr. Dibs inseminates Boyse represents her womb. It's a replica/ visualization of the Orion Nebula; an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen and helium located in the Milky Way. It is the brightest nebula visible from earth and can be seen with the naked eye in the night sky.
The film's world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival 2018 has caused multiple walkouts during its screening because of how graphically disturbing and provocative it was. Despite its divisive reactions from the audience, the movie was well received from film critics attending the festival.
Dr. Dibs is based on Medea, a Greek tragedy written by Euripides, who revenges her husband by murdering her own children and his new wife.
Claire Denis: "The film is about sexuality, not sex. Sensuality, not pornography. Sexuality is about fluids. As soon as sexuality stirs within us, we know it's all about fluids - blood, sperm, etc. I thought if I wanted that fluid subtext to work, we had to reduce the sex act to masturbation. I forbade myself any naked scenes. No erect cocks, no gaping pussies. We did it another way - High Life speaks only of desire and of fluids. The film shows many taboos - about our own bodies, the taboos of intimacy, and the taboo around, of course, incest. It's a taboo, but it exists."
Danish-Icelandic conceptual artist Ólafur Eliasson, who is known for sculptures and large scale installation art employing elemental materials, invented the yellow horizon light installation representing the singularity of a black hole at the film's end, which was originally presented at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris and was also used for his famous art installation 'The Weather Project' representing the sun at the Tate Modern museum in London in 2003.
In the script-writing process, Claire Denis collaborated with French astrophysicist and philosopher Aurélien Barrau, who is specialized in particle astrophysics, black holes and cosmology.
Patricia Arquette was attached to star as Dr. Dibs, but was replaced by Juliette Binoche due to scheduling conflicts. Denis and Binoche had just finished filming Let the Sunshine In (2017) when they got the news, so Binoche offered to play the part instead.
The original script was only 30 pages long and unconventional in the sense that unlike normal scripts, it wasn't the story itself but instead only the description of a few key scenes and scientific facts like the Penrose Process. Many of the decisions and changes took place while filming.
When filming began, the final script was just a few pages long with was only Claire Denis's vision for the film. It was described as 'unusual' and 'quite skeletal' by actors and producers. According to the producers, "the script took shape as we were filming. There were meetings when actors wanted to get a handle on characters, were confused and they wanted to know more about how space works. We had astro-physicists come down to talk with them. Claire [Denis] purposefully didn't need her performers to understand every beat. Part of this movie is about the unknown and about characters who don't necessarily understand why they are where they are."
Before Robert Pattinson reached out to work with Claire Denis, the producers suggested Daniel Craig for the role of Monte, but Denis didn't feel he was the right one after meeting him.
On the computer screens in the spaceship, there are three images from earth: a TV broadcast of a rugby match, a home video of Claire Denis's nephew jumping in the waves on a beach, and a scene where indians are gathered around a fire for a funeral from the documentary In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914).
Claire Denis reached out to André 3000 to play the part because she had seen his portrayal as Jimi Hendrix in Jimi: All Is by My Side (2013).
It's the eighth time that English musician and lead singer of the indie band Tindersticks, Stuart Staples, worked with Claire Denis and composed the music for her films.
Claire Denis stated that Monte and Boyse (played by Pattinson and Mia Goth) were "sort of attracted to each other."
Principal photography took place in September and October 2017 in a film studio in Cologne, Germany. A few miles next to it was the EAC, the European Astronaut Centre, at which the cast and director trained before filming started.
Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche previously appeared together in David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis (2012) as a billionaire and his mistress who are having sex in his limousine.
This is the fourth horror movie for Mia Goth, following A Cure for Wellness (2016), The Secret of Marrowbone (2017) and the remake Suspiria (2018).
Juliette Binoche and Claire Tran previously appeared in Claire Denis's Let the Sunshine In (2017) and Claire Tran also appeared in Denis's Bastards (2013).
Spoilers
Claire Denis about the films end: "There was no other ending for me. Never. For me, there is hope in that ending, it's not sad. I thought they were going somewhere, and that somewhere was mysterious -- a place nobody has been before. But it doesn't mean to me that they're dying. When Monte says to his daughter, 'Shall we?', to me it doesn't mean 'Shall we die?'. To me, 'Shall we?' is what you ask when you're about to dance with someone."
Until the film's end, the ship has been in space for 6,750 days (18 years), which equals to 76,864 days (210 years) on earth.
Claire Denis: "It's possible to go into a very large black hole without dying, and stay there for a while. It's something they have studied, it's possible. I was told if the black hole is big enough, so you're not immediately squashed in by the gravitational field, you can survive. And if you could reach the limit of a black hole, that point of singularity, as they call it, it's a sort of eternity: It's where time and space are virtually zero, they don't exist anymore. You can try and understand, but our brains are not trained for that."
The moment Mia Goth's character vanishes in the black hole is called spaghettification and was first described by Stephen Hawking: the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects into long thin shapes (like spaghetti) in a very strong gravitational field, such as black holes, caused by extreme tidal forces so powerful that not even light escapes its grip. In short, a person turns to dough, their frame lengthening until the legs and torso pull thin enough to form a noodle shape. At that point, the black hole liquefies the body and shreds it apart nerve by nerve. As a final result, the body evaporates.
Claire Denis about the yellow horizon light at the films end representing the singularity of a black hole invented by Olafur Eliasson: "What inspired me most was the golden, yellow light he invented. It is what you find if you see inside a black hole. It is extraordinary when human skin is in this light -- it loses color and becomes bronze. It is almost a clinical transformation. The end shot is not digital -- this is when it opens up to be completely white. This contrasts with the rest of the film: the reddish uniform for the prisoners. This goes against usual science fiction, with its shiny whiteness that suggests purity, conquest, glory. I wanted a darker hue, a shadow."
According to Claire Denis , 'High' stands for outer space and 'Life' for the life Juliette Binoche's character wants to create. But it's above all a word that comes from Africa where she grew up and spent her childhood: Africans often refer to white life as high life.
