The 1974 movie Gaspar Noé is surprisingly obsessed with: “Could watch it seven consecutive days”
When Gaspar Noé made his 2018 film Climax, an intoxicating drug-fuelled journey into pure human horror channelled through dance, you’d probably assume his primary inspiration to be something like Dario Argento’s Suspiria.
The classic Italian horror film is, of course, much more rooted in the supernatural, whereas the scariest thing about Climax is how quickly humans turn their backs on one another in times of crisis; still, the influence was certainly there, bright colours and all.
More unexpectedly, however, is the influence of a movie that you wouldn’t expect someone like the arthouse master to enjoy, and yet, as a child, he became obsessed with a certain disaster film that stuck with him as he got older, leading him to draw from it to make Climax.
In this case, it was The Towering Inferno, the Irwin Allen-produced, star-studded epic that helped pave the way for future action-packed blockbusters, which really did it for Noé. You can’t imagine the Argentinian-born filmmaker ever making a movie that looks like The Towering Inferno, but the film’s quest to save its party-guests as a fire spreads through the skyscraper clearly sparked something in his mind.
“This movie [Climax], on the other hand, really reminds me of catastrophe movies, like The Towering Inferno,” the filmmaker told Roger Ebert. “I remember The Towering Inferno when it came out, I was probably ten years old, but I could watch it seven consecutive days in the week. I would go and watch it over and over and over.”
The film was a huge hit upon its release in 1974, winning several Academy Awards, such as ‘Best Cinematography’. With its stacked cast, which included the likes of Fred Astaire, Faye Dunaway, Steve McQueen, and Paul Newman, the movie could hardly go unnoticed, and while it risked becoming a bit of throwaway Hollywood drama, John Guillermin’s film managed to succeed.
There was genuine tension as the audience was left on the edge of their seats, waiting to discover which of these major Hollywood stars would survive the fire. As far as disaster movies go, The Towering Inferno stands as one of the most genuinely suspenseful and one of the better entries into a genre that soon went downhill.
The spectacle of watching such an intense disaster unfold from the comfort of the movie theatre never got old for Noé, even though he knew how the movie ended, who was going to make it out alive. “But yeah, in those big American movies, it was always the nice people who would survive at the end, besides one, and the cruel people who would die at the end,” he added.
In Climax, Noé doesn’t conform to this Hollywood formula, though, with the person responsible for spiking the punch with acid walking away scot-free, while the more innocent characters (although they’re all pretty reprehensible), such as the young child, aren’t so lucky. This is as close as the filmmaker will likely ever get to a ‘disaster movie’ in the traditional sense, and it seems like The Towering Inferno’s influence is to thank.
