Gaspar Noé asks if ‘the whole of America is turning so stupid’ they need Marvel ‘to represent their minds’

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Director Gaspar Noé has strongly condemned Marvel movies, questioning whether they are making audiences “stupid”.

The acclaimed French-Argentine filmmaker – famous for his 2002 film Irreversible starring Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel – spoke about current cinema in a new interview with The Independent.

Noé said: “It’s like the question, did Hitler create Nazi Germany or did Nazi Germany create Hitler?

“Do you think the Marvel movies are turning the Americans stupid or is the whole of America turning so stupid that they need such stupid movies to represent their minds?”

Noé is known as a controversial filmmaker, having attracted criticism for depicting a rape scene over 10 minutes long in his film Irreversible.

Elsewhere in the interview, Noé spoke about the recent success of his 2015 movie Love, which attracted huge audiences on Netflix when it was added to the streaming giant in 2020.

Noé said the film was successful during lockdown “because the audience is made of humans who need to masturbate”. Love features many scenes of unsimulated sex.

Noé is not the first filmmaker to criticise superhero movies, with The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola calling them “despicable”.

Prior to that, Martin Scorsese said that he had “tried” to watch movies from the MCU, but later decided that they are “not cinema”. He compared them instead to “theme parks”.

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“It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being,” said Scorsese.

Noé’s recently released film Vortex – about an elderly couple in Paris nearing the end of their lives – has received hugely positive reviews from critics. You can read The Independent’s four-star review of Vortex here.