Interview: Gaspar Noé, film director

• Filmmaker Gaspar No is no stranger to controversy, but has he overstepped the mark with his latest work?

Given that the film, a brutal revenge-and-rape movie, features some of the most nauseatingly violent scenes committed to celluloid, it's not hard to see why its ongoing popularity remains a minor source of surprise to the Argentinean-born/French-based director.

"I thought it would be a hardcore cult film, but instead it became a popular movie and a commercial reference point for other writers and producers." Not that he's complaining about the success, of course, or the notoriety that came with it when it was jeered at the 2002 Cannes film festival. "The good thing about offending some people who maybe want to be offended," says No, "is that if they insult you, the people who like your movie will rave about it even more, so the more enemies you have, the more friends you will have on the other side."

No's new film, Enter the Void, is about to put this theory to the test once more. It's a psychedelic film shot entirely from the point of view of Oscar (Nathanial Brown), a young drug-dealer living in Tokyo with his stripper sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta).

When police shoot and kill Oscar during a narcotics sting, we follow his spirit as it floats above the city taking us on an acid flashback through his life and the events leading up to his death. Filled with trippy visuals and graphic images, it would seem like business as usual for the enfant terrible of French cinema – except that when the film premiered as a "work in progress" at the 2009 film festival it didn't generate much reaction.

Sixteen months on, it's not hard to see why. The version opening in British cinemas this week (it's 17 minutes shorter, though No insists no controversial scenes were cut) has a determinedly juvenile streak running through it - the result, perhaps, of the 46-year-old's attempt to replicate the drug experiences of his youth.

"I've smoked joints, taken acid, had mushrooms, and when you're in those altered states and thinking about cinema you're like, 'How come I've never seen on screen what I'm perceiving now?' I always thought it would be funny to do a movie inside the head of someone who is stoned, which is kind of teenager's dream.

"In many ways," he continues, "this movie talks more about the film buff desires of my early twenties than what I am dreaming of today. But sometimes you make a promise to yourself and you want to keep that promise. I promised myself I would do this movie when I was around 20, 25."

The film's immaturity is reflected in some of the references he name-checks, citing, of all things, Flatliners, Joel Schumacher's terrible 1990 afterlife thriller starring Julia Roberts. Tron was another touchstone, especially in trying to represent Oscar's hallucinogenic state while on the drug DMT. "People who take DMT come back from their visions saying 'Ooh, I felt like I was in the movie Tron,' because you have these visions that are very sharp with very bright colours that seem like neon lights. The end of 2001 seems like a DMT trip too."

Ah yes, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The shadow of Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi classic certainly looms largest over Enter the Void. "That movie shocked me the most cinematically speaking or artistically speaking," says No. "I'm obsessed with it."

Was Enter the Void a conscious attempt to try and replicate the experience he had while watching that film for the first time, then? "Maybe. I think the main goal was to create an atheist religious movie. I think that's how Kubrick would have described his own movie."

Still, it's probably best not to push the Kubrick comparisons too far. The mind-blowing lightshow at the end of 2001 was in service to a story that charted the entire spectrum of human existence. No's film charts the spiritual malaise of a low-level junkie. If anything, Enter the Void seems more like the art-house Avatar – an immersive visual experience tethered to a fairly rote story. Its plot points – drugs, prostitution, car-crash-induced family tragedy – certainly read like a checklist of world cinema clichs.

I ask if he thinks his characters are worthy enough to be the focus of a film that's striving to say something profound about life, or if, like Avatar, he needed easy-to-grasp story beats to help the audience get lost in the film's alternate universe? He fixates on the Avatar comparison.

"I saw that movie after my movie so I was not inspired by Avatar."

That's not what I was getting at...

"There were some parallels," he continues, "but my movie is not in 3D and many people complain that it is not in 3D. It would have been impossible to get the money to do a 3D movie at the time.

"But the main character, Oscar," he says, eventually, "he could easily have been called Gaspar, but I thought people would think it was an autobiographical story." He goes on to explain that the character is supposed to be "there but not there," and likens the film to a first-person video game in which you have to kill zombies and identify with the gun on the screen. "I haven't seen many movies that are conceptual like that from beginning to end. Lady in the Lake is one," he adds, referring to the 1947 Raymond Chandler adaptation that was famously shot entirely from Philip Marlowe's point-of-view.

The film could be viewed as a dreamlike detective story set in Oscar's subconscious, but it's hard to escape the suspicion that it's an excuse to indulge in lots of controversy-courting Freudian imagery, something that's been a feature of No's work since his short film Carn in 1991. In Enter the Void he goes all out, with multiple shots of children being breast fed, not to mention the calculated outrageousness of the film's money shot: a scene of CGI-enhanced coitus depicting a penis ejaculating inside a vagina.

"I have a very mammal perception of life and I'm very sentimental," says No by way of explanation. "Women don't want to be represented as milk-givers, but for me it's just an image that links a newborn baby to its future life: the first way you survive life is by drinking your mother's milk."

Since we're on the subject of childhood, I ask if growing up as the son of Argentinian painter Lois Felipe No had an impact on his subsequent career. Moving between Buenos Aires, New York and Paris as a child, did, he says, give him a valuable outsider perspective. "You have a clearer vision of the world you are in. You don't know the rules but are amazed by all the differences. I live in France and in many ways I'm part of French cinema, but I'm also happy that I don't have a French passport. I don't owe anything to the French flag."

• Enter the Void is released on Friday