"Another one that I was very inspired by and touched by in all its ugliness and brutality, but its daring story structure, was Gasper Noe’s Irréversible, which is an odd one, but I just found the idea of starting at the end and telling it backwards as such a conceit. And the world it took you in, and the way it took you in, I felt that was something new that I’d never seen before. It’s a journey through hell, starting at the end and working backwards to the beginning. So it’s sort of Paris’ underground, and it has a rape scene in it of Monica Belluci that’s one of the most frank, most brutal… You know, people kid about rape, you just say, “Yeah, I think you should watch this movie and see what rape really looks like. You should see how violent and terrible it is and then you’ll not make any jokes anymore.” It’s so balls-out, this film. It’s so unafraid. It’s so in-your-face. It’s one of those movies that, once you see [it], you will never forget it, and it keeps coming back to you and back to you. It’s not necessarily a pleasant thing, but it was definitely a filmmaker who said, “I don’t give a f— what anyone thinks. Anybody. Not the critics, not my friends, not the finance producers, nobody. I’m just going out to tell my story the way I want to tell it.” Vincent Cassel is so great in it, and Belluci. It’s really a very powerful movie."