Gaspar Julio Noé Murphy (born 27 December 1963), known professionally as Gaspar Noé, is an Argentine filmmaker and screenwriter, who lives and works primarily in France. He is one of the primary exponents of New French Extremity, associated with its graphic nature of unsimulated sex, drugs, epilepsy, and violence.
As of 2026, he has directed seven feature films, I Stand Alone (1998), Irréversible (2002), Enter the Void (2009), Love (2015), Climax (2018), Lux Æterna (2019), and Vortex (2021).
Gaspar Julio Noé Murphy was born on 27 December 1963 in Buenos Aires, Argentina to Luis Felipe Noé, a prominent Argentine artist, writer, and intellectual of Italian descent, and Nora Murphy, a social worker of Irish descent. He has a sister named Paula. Noé moved to New York City with his parents, and resided on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. Noé returned to Argentina at the age of 5 and emigrated to France in 1976 to escape the military dictatorship occurring in Argentina at the time. Noé obtained Italian citizenship from lineage, and is a dual-citizen of Argentina and Italy, but does not consider himself Italian.
Noé initially wanted to become a cartoonist, but became interested in filmmaking after his father gifted him a Super 8 camera that he bought in a Brazilian airport. Noé shot a reel with his best friend Juan Diego Solanas jumping from the Pont Neuf. He graduated from the École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière in Paris. Following his graduation in 1982, he worked as an assistant director on Fernando Solanas's Tangos, the Exile of Gardel (1986) and Sur (1988). Noé's first officially released short film Carne premiered in 1991.
Noé and French filmmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović have repeatedly collaborated with each other on film projects since 1987. In the early 1990s, Noé co-founded the production company Les Cinémas de la Zone with Hadžihalilović. Noé operated the camera and was the cinematographer for two short films directed by Hadžihalilović: La Bouche de Jean-Pierre (1996) and Good Boys Use Condoms (1998). Similarly, Hadžihalilović produced and edited Carne (1991), edited Seul contre tous (1998), and was credited as a writer on Enter the Void (2009). The creative collaboration is made clear in the comparable stylistic choices across these early films, most clearly the credit sequences and the marketing designs. In 2025, Noé portrayed a film director in Hadžihalilović's fourth feature film, The Ice Tower.
Three of his films feature the character of a nameless butcher played by Philippe Nahon: Carne, I Stand Alone, and, in a cameo, Irréversible.
All of Noé's feature films are shot by cinematographer Benoît Debie.
The music for Irréversible was composed by Thomas Bangalter. The latter also sent Noé an unreleased song he made circa 1995 for Climax. The song was named "Sangria" in reference to the movie.
In collaboration with Saint Laurent, he directed films Lux Æterna and Saint Laurent - Summer of '21.
Noé's work has been strongly associated with a collection of films often described as new extreme films. Highlighting their challenging sexual and violent bodily imagery, Tim Palmer has described them as part of a cinéma du corps (cinema of the body), and a cinema of "brutal intimacy" because of its attenuated use of narrative, generally assaulting and often illegible cinematography, confrontational subject material, a treatment of sexual behavior as violent rather than mutually intimate, and a pervasive sense of social nihilism or despair.
Noé often directly addresses the audience in confrontational ways, most notably in I Stand Alone, when an intertitle warns the audience that they have 30 seconds to leave the cinema before the final violent climax. In a different way, this can be seen in Irreversible, in which the 10-minute long single-take rape sequence has frequently been read as an assault on viewers, as well as a depiction of an assault on the female character.
Noé stated in the September 2012 edition of Sight & Sound magazine that seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey at the age of seven changed his life, an experience without which he would never have become a director. A poster for the film features notably in a scene towards the end of Irreversible. He also credits his mother for taking him to see other transgressive films as a child, including one by Fassbinder, and cites the skeleton fight scene from Jason and the Argonauts as a core memory from his youth.
Many of his movies feature all kind of film posters, which reflects his collection and passion for them. He is believed to be the owner of one of the three known copies of the rarest poster for the 1931 film M. Since Irréversible, he's kept working with French film poster designer Laurent Lufroy for all his feature films: Lufroy even appears in Love (as a policeman), Climax (as a dog-handler), and Lux Æterna (using a torch).
Additional influences cited by Noé include the French photographer Pierre Molinier, the Japanese director Koji Wakamatsu (particularly the film The Embryo Hunts in Secret), Spanish-Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel (particularly the films Un Chien Andalou and Los Olvidados), David Lynch's Eraserhead, Le Professeur Choron (the founder of Hara Kiri magazine), and Argentinian painter Jorge De La Vega (who is also Noé's godfather).
Many specific scenes and filmmaking decision from Noé's work were inspired by films. The warning in I Stand Alone was influenced by the film Homicidal (1961). Irreversible was inspired by the film Betrayal (1983), for its reverse chronology, as well as the films In the Realm of the Senses (1976), I Am Cuba (1964), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Straw Dogs (1971), Deliverance (1972), and Death Wish (1974). The POV camera in Enter the Void was inspired by Lady in the Lake (1947). Additionally, the use of 3D in Love was inspired by Gravity.
Noé also cites the 1983 Austrian serial killer film, Angst, by Gerald Kargl, and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver as additional influences. He has said De Niro's performance in Raging Bull was his "favorite male performance ever."
One of Noé's favorite books is An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne.
Noé has been in a relationship with French filmmaker and frequent collaborator Lucile Hadžihalilović since 1985, after meeting on the set of Noé's first short film, Tintarella di Luna. Some sources say that Noé and Hadžihalilović are married, but Noé refers to Hadžihalilović as "my girlfriend" and "my life partner" in interviews.