Contrary to the internet’s belief, filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn’s career did not begin with 2011’s Drive, the Los Angeles getaway driver thriller starring Ryan Gosling as an asocial aura-farming antihero. In truth, Drive marked the halfway point of Refn’s career; the Danish provocateur had already explored the dark psychological side of Copenhagen crime in his Pusher trilogy, given Tom Hardy his breakout role as England’s most violent offender in Bronson, and even tried to capitalize on the serial killer psychological thriller with his American debut Fear X. But since Drive, Refn has cemented his style—monotone heroes harboring an inscrutable darkness and navigating a heightened, ersatz world of beauty, luxury and dangerous impulses—pushed to its limit through his friendship with Hideo Kojima, his commercial work for luxury brands, and, now, even AI.
Across Only God Forgives, The Neon Demon, and Refn’s two streaming series—the criminally underrated Too Old To Die Young and the puzzling Copenhagen Cowboy—Refn digs deeper into his singular instincts, even as they chip away at his once widespread goodwill. Scenes are drenched in neon, beautiful faces are fixed in agony and apathy, and high and low culture collide in a way that makes the director’s exploitation influences appealing and unpleasant in equal measure. Her Private Hell, Refn’s first feature in ten years, commits to its intoxicating style harder than ever before: mysticism blended with pulp fiction archetypes, with characters nakedly admitting their fetishization of ultra-violence.
Nobody is more emotional about his return to movies than Refn, who broke down in tears at the press conference in Cannes remembering how, three years ago, he died for 25 minutes with a “leaking heart.” Refn spoke to The A.V. Club about his uncompromising return to cinema, and why Her Private Hell is more rejuvenation than retread.
The A.V. Club: You’ve spoken about the rebirth that triggered this film. Did that make you incorporate themes of rebirth into the film itself?
Nicolas Winding Refn: I don’t know that it triggered it, but once I was brought back and my body became healthy again, my mind was rejuvenated. Like the superheroes that drink or eat something and their brain becomes super laser-focused. I knew I wanted to make another movie, I thought that could be fun, because it’s what I did in my past life. I’d been given this gift of dying. Not a lot of people get a second chance. When you die, everything is basically erased and you can start over. It’s like Dawn Of The Dead, society can start over again, it’s very seductive. So I [thought], I’ll make a movie, but I didn’t know what it was, so actually it was [Neon founder] Tom Quinn, in a way, who got me going by saying, “If you make the movie for a certain amount of money, I can guarantee it.”
Both your streaming series push the idea of duration and stillness. Coming back for Her Private Hell, cinema is more economical, shorter, impactful, all on a bigger screen. Has your work changed since doing TV?
NWR: No, I was following an evolutionary trend. In 2016 when I did The Neon Demon, television was exploding as a format that was going to change everything. Even when I was doing Only God Forgives, and Netflix was emerging as a real place of creativity, you knew that things were going to change. The internet was now full access, our habits were suddenly being serviced in new ways. I wanted to explore what that was like. The first show I did was Too Old To Die Young for Amazon, I obviously very much enjoyed making it. Not sure if Amazon was that happy, but that’s cool. The second time with Netflix, it was the same thing again, you make these very long formats…It was fun, but then I had this opportunity to go and work with Prada for [something] more like an art installation.
That I really enjoyed, because suddenly I was working in a format that didn’t need commercial aspirations. It was purely to create, and that became the final stage of what I was moving towards. Now I had nothing left. I’d done everything I wanted to do. So when I came back, I looked at movies as, “What is the most important thing to make us human?” That’s a collective experience. Even though we have it in the privacy of our homes or phones, bringing people together in a theater is still something that is a human dignity, it’s a human kindness. Even though we can be as different as we are—and a lot of people are very different—something like that brings us together. That is what that cinema can do.
Your work often looks at a specific geographical place, whether it’s Mexico in Too Old To Die Young, L.A. in The Neon Demon, or England in Bronson. But the soundstages in Her Private Hell are far more abstract. Can you talk about the sense of place in the film?
NWR: I had ideas of where I wanted to shoot, and I went to visit these places. I went to Seoul, I went to Tokyo, great cities, wonderful crews, but my dilemma was that the world that I had [imagined] just didn’t exist. I couldn’t find it physically. I had to build it. But that also spoke to me, because in a way I wanted to make the film an opera, which meant that it had to be artificial. It was world-building. Having been introduced to gaming from my friend Hideo, seeing what world-building really was like, and how in gaming you have to create everything from scratch, I was almost envious of that because that must be so much fun. How could I bring that to a movie? Building it became the foundation.
I was surprised by the score. Maybe it’s my limited imagination, but I expected more electronic sounds. What made you pursue an orchestral score?
NWR: It was when I’d finished shooting the film. I had played a lot of different kinds of music when we were making it, [but] I realized to go all the way was to make it an opera. Which meant finding a composer who can write opera, but opera in a sense of movie-world opera. Pino [Donaggio] is the last surviving giant of the Italian music club that defines a lot of what we see as popular film music. They all come from Italy, they’ve all made a lot of movies, but the music is sometimes the most famous part. The only one that was alive, I discovered, was Pino, and I’d been using his scores from other films as inspiration. I reached out, he agreed, and I said, “I want you to write an opera, as extravagant as that sounds, that’s what you need to do.” Everything had to be theme-oriented.
I was particularly struck by Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton leading their own storylines. Can you talk about how you landed on them and how they responded to the material?
NWR: For the girls, I already was in the process with the casting directors a year prior to shooting, during the writing process. We saw a lot of wonderful people, but you’re always waiting for that click. We were getting closer to the production date, then Sophie came in for an audition and, even before she read, I was like, it’s her. I just knew instinctively, there she is. It was a similar experience I had on Copenhagen Cowboy, where we were looking for a very specific person in a tiny pool of talent, yet out of that tiny pool Angela [Bundalovic] revealed herself.
Private K was a little more esoteric in the sense that, as a character, he comes from the traditions of the Scottish Highlands, this “One-Eye” played by Mads Mikkelsen [in Valhalla Rising], and then that character Ryan Gosling played in Drive, and Vithaya [Pansringarm] played in Only God Forgives as the lieutenant. And then Angela in Copenhagen Cowboy—he went from a mute viking to a female alien, and now it was time to bring it back to something that was almost more fetishized as a male with Private K, with his uniform and utility belt like a superhero. They all are superheroes, my own little world where all the heroes fight each other.
But who was going to play him? Lizzielou, my youngest daughter, was a big fan of Riverdale. She kept talking about it, so I finally said, “Okay, I’ll show you something, and see something of yours”—an exchange. So she showed me an episode of a season that takes place in the ’50s, and there comes Charles with his hair and leather jacket, and I was like, “It’s him. That’s Private K. I don’t even need to audition him, let’s just get him.”
How did he respond?
NWR: I said cinema needs heroes. What male actor doesn’t want to be an action hero who saves the innocents?
Making a film about an actress who is making a film adds a new layer around questioning reality. What’s the significance for you of Elle being an actress?
NWR: You always have to give a character an identity. What does this character do? We played around with many ideas, but in the end, because I had this idea of Candy Floss, which I’ll make in the future, making a movie just became a natural place. But I didn’t necessarily want to show movie-making. I don’t find that as interesting, but I love the setting, the theatrical nature of it. Then saying that this movie is gonna be hell, or this movie won’t fix us—we use cinema or any kind of culture to define our emotions. I saw this, or I read that, and now I understand this, I see myself in that. We mirror ourselves a lot in culture, so there’s a kind of multiple feeling.
With Candy Floss, you’re mixing pulpy sci-fi with mystical elements. Is this instinctual for you, mixing high and low culture?
NWR: I love the mix. I mean, that’s exploitation. Exploitation is taking the lowest of the low of the highest of the high and mixing it together. That’s why I never saw exploitation as a negative thing. On the contrary, it’s sometimes the most interesting. It goes back to fairy tales. Fairy tales are a very exploitative format because it’s very easy to access, and it plays on stereotypes and cliches, because they work. Now, the question is, how do you make them yours? When you define them, you end up making your own form of narrative.
You’ve got various recurring motifs, let’s call them, in the film—including cutting off hands. I’m not going to ask you to explain your symbolism, but what is the impulse to return to these powerful images?
NWR: I’ve always been obsessed with my hands, for some reason. It’s this thing about touching. I use more hand lotion than what exists in the world. There’s something about hands. Next to the eyes, it’s the feature that speaks [most] to our senses. If you can’t touch with your fingertips, you lose intimacy because it’s the most intimate sensibility to touch, like taste or seeing. Obviously, there are concepts of the eye and stabbing the eye, and the eye of the viewer, losing both eyes and being blind, so there are certain archetypes of how our senses work that flow through film. There are things that I sometimes now see [and think], “Oh, I never thought that it connects like this or connects like that.”
Which means it’s always alive.
NWR: I think that’s the best form of cinema. Who wants to live in the world of dead space?
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