Poppe was born on 24 June 1960 in Oslo to Aase and Per Frølich Poppe, who was a fashion designer in winter sport clothing. As a child he grew up in Portugal and Norway.

He graduated as a cinematographer at Dramatiska Institutet – University College of Film, Radio, Television and Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden in 1991. He have conducted several artistic and directorial research programs between 2001 and 2010.

Erik Poppe was also the key director for “Brigaden” (The Brigade) in 2002. A 26 episodes TV-drama for NRK (The Norwegian Broadcasting Corp). Brigaden received the Norwegian “Amanda” Price for the Best TV-drama in 2003.

Erik Poppe is the only director to have received the Norwegian National Film Critics’ Award four times. Hawaii-Oslo in 2005, Troubled Water in 2009, A Thousand Times Good Night in 2014 and The Kings Choice in 2017 – all movies were also voted as last year’s Best Feature.

Troubled Water made history at the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2008 by being the first feature to win both the festival’s Golden Starfish for Best Narrative Feature and the Audience Award.

Fugelli was diagnosed with cancer in 2009. In 2015 he said no to further treatment and allowed his close friend, director Erik Poppe to follow him as far as possible on this journey. The result is I DIE (Siste resept) a film about life and how to live it to the very end.

When he received the price for best film in 2014 at The Amanda, he became historical by being the only director to have been nominated for all his feature movies (five movies) in the categories best film or/ and best director at the Amanda, Norway’s national film prizes.

In 2015 Poppe concluded a PhD as a research fellow at the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme and as an Associated Professor at HIL, Lillehammer University College/ The Norwegian Film School. “The Subjective Objective” is an exploration on how to achieve increased emotionally outcome by the use of a highly personalized and strictly subjectively point of view in conscious narrative film. -Is it possible to achieve a stronger identification, empathy and a greater involvement for the spectator by applying a strict enforcement of the subjective point of view? -A point of view who never allows the filmmaker to show for the spectator more than the film’s protagonist are seeing or experiencing at any time.

In June 2017 it was announced that Erik Poppe had worked for a year on developing a feature film about the 2011 terrorist attack on Utøya outside Oslo, Norway. The film, entitled U, begins 12 minutes before the first shot on Utøya as we meet Kaja (18), her little sister, and their friends at summer camp. When the shooting begins panic spreads, and over the next 72 minutes we follow Kaja in her escape – minute by minute. She becomes separated from her little sister, and in the search for her she finds other youngsters with different strategies for survival. Some make it, others do not. U July 22 (Utøya 22.juli) is a fictional account of events which will tell the story from the young people’s perspective, based on a series of in-depth interviews conducted with survivors from Utøya. Some of them was on set behind the camera while filming took place in September 2017 to help give the narrative credibility.