Citing his personal interest in objectification and complete lack of awareness toward what happened last time, Drive and Neon Demon director Nicholas Winding Refn says he’d “love” to make Batgirl if given the chance to make a superhero movie. To be fair, he doesn’t seem that in love with the idea, and even later in this interview with Deadline, Refn says, “I don’t know if I’ll make an actual I.P.” But for a moment, let’s indulge Refn because, hoo boy, that would be a weird movie.
Asked by Deadline at Cannes, where he’s promoting his new movie, Her Private Hell, if he’d like to make a superhero movie, Refn jumped on Batgirl because “Wonder Woman is done,” and that was one he “thought was super heavy.” But, “you know, Batgirl is kinda cool,” he trails off. Refn suggests this from a place of ignorance, having totally missed Warner Bros. Discovery’s early days of shelving completed movies for tax write-downs. When Deadline‘s interviewer fills him in on the details, that Batgirl, directed by Bad Boys For Life directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, had mostly been completed when WBD decided to shelve it, Refn appears mostly unmoved—though in all fairness, that scenario would probably happen again if Refn directed a version.
Refn’s interest in Batgirl is primarily aesthetic, coupled with his long-held interests in “the objectification of objects.” “I love the aesthetics,” he continues. “A lot of Her Private Hell is my obsession with dolls, objects, and how to move people around in space and time. I loved the objectification of objects in superheroes and comic books, and that whole subculture. It’s where I come from. I collect Japanese toys, I play with Legos. I have Legos in my pockets right now.”
Leaving the fantasy world where Nicholas Winding Refn directs Batgirl, the filmmaker gets real and says, “I tend to be more interested in my own kind of universe. It keeps it more real to me. I can make it without all the politics. But I have an idea to make something very superhero-driven because I always loved that. I used to go buy comic books when I was little.”
As much as we’d love to see Refn’s version of the Killing Joke scene where Joker shoots Batgirl in the stomach in the slowest of motion, there’s room here for Refn to put those Legos in his pocket to work. Is it time for a hyper-violent, objectification-heavy Lego Movie reboot? In Refn’s words, it would be “kinda cool.”
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