The one James Bond movie that sparked Gaspar Noé’s “sexual obsession”
Gaspar Noé, the Argentine-Italian filmmaker, is renowned for his provocative and sexually charged films. In his 2018 horror-musical cult classic Climax, a group of French dancers gather in an empty building for a rehearsal on a winter night, only for the evening to spiral into a hallucinatory nightmare. The film, often described as disturbing and challenging, has also been celebrated as technically brilliant for its innovative style and visceral storytelling.
In a 2015 interview with The Playlist, the director was asked what the first sexual scene he remembers being inspired by, and funnily enough, the Noé’s answer was “not a sex scene”. Instead, he details a scene from the 1974 James Bond film The Man With The Golden Gun as his “first sexual obsession”.
“Not a sex scene, but I know my first sexual obsession. I was a very young kid when I saw the James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun, and there was an actress called Maud Adams in it,” the filmmaker revealed with the coyness of a teenager caught red-handed. “I had a crush [laughs]. Sometimes, you can be ten years old, but you have an adult addiction, almost sexual, to the female figure.”
For Noé, the adoration was real: “I remember I was obsessed with her photos and would cut them out of the newspaper. I’d study the joints on her face. I think that was my first cinematic crush with a woman. But I don’t know how sexual it was between her and James Bond, just her face turned me on like a junkie.”
Maud Adams is a Swedish actress and model who played two different ‘Bond girls’. Once, of course, in The Man with the Golden Gun, but also later in 1983’s Octopussy. One must assume that the “joints in her face” that Noé refers to are Adam’s high cheekbones.
Noé expanded his thoughts on sex scenes in film during the interview, saying, “We believe we live in an open Western society that is not religious. But when it comes to the presentation of sex in a loving way – everybody is obsessed with it”. He goes on to say that “love is a general, universal obsession” and that he doesn’t understand why people “always close the door when you get to the joyful aspects of life”.
Noé expresses nostalgia for the filmmakers of the 1970s who were “doing movies containing sex scenes that were not sex movies as you may call them”. He believes the “presentation of love in real life is missing from the movie theatres”. Noé doesn’t understand why children are allowed to see films with violence, but “two grown-up persons kissing and enjoying their bodies, that’s a problem?”
When asked about his favourite sex scene, Noé mentions the 1973 horror film Don’t Look Now, directed by Nicolas Roeg. Noé says, “It’s very powerful. It’s unusual to see such a sexual scene in a Hollywood movie”. As this interview took place three years before Noé’s Climax, we can hope and assume he managed to realise his thoughts on sex in cinema through this film. When asked if he had any mainstream aspirations as a filmmaker, Noé responded, “I just want to be able to pay my rent and buy movie posters”.
