{"id":553941,"date":"2026-07-22T11:38:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T11:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/553941\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T11:38:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T11:38:08","slug":"nicolas-winding-refn-on-his-operatic-return-to-the-big-screen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/553941\/","title":{"rendered":"Nicolas Winding Refn on his operatic return to the big screen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Contrary to the internet\u2019s belief, filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn\u2019s career did not begin with 2011\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014monotone heroes harboring an inscrutable darkness and navigating a heightened, ersatz world of beauty, luxury and dangerous impulses\u2014pushed to its limit through his friendship with Hideo Kojima, his commercial work for luxury brands, and, now, even AI<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Across Only God Forgives, The Neon Demon, and Refn\u2019s two streaming series\u2014the criminally underrated Too Old To Die Young and the puzzling Copenhagen Cowboy\u2014Refn 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\u2019s exploitation influences appealing and unpleasant in equal measure. Her Private Hell<\/a>, Refn\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Nobody is more emotional about his return to movies than Refn, who broke down in tears<\/a> at the press conference in Cannes remembering how, three years ago, he died for 25 minutes with a \u201cleaking heart.\u201d Refn spoke to The A.V. Club about his uncompromising return to cinema, and why Her Private Hell is more rejuvenation than retread.<\/p>\n

The A.V. Club: You\u2019ve spoken about the rebirth that triggered this film. Did that make you incorporate themes of rebirth into the film itself?<\/p>\n

Nicolas Winding Refn: I don\u2019t 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\u2019s what I did in my past life. I\u2019d 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\u2019s like Dawn Of The Dead, society can start over again, it\u2019s very seductive. So I [thought], I\u2019ll make a movie, but I didn\u2019t know what it was, so actually it was [Neon founder] Tom Quinn, in a way, who got me going by saying, \u201cIf you make the movie for a certain amount of money, I can guarantee it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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\u2019s cool. The second time with Netflix, it was the same thing again, you make these very long formats\u2026It was fun, but then I had this opportunity to go and work with Prada for [something] more like an art installation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That I really enjoyed, because suddenly I was working in a format that didn\u2019t 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\u2019d done everything I wanted to do. So when I came back, I looked at movies as, \u201cWhat is the most important thing to make us human?\u201d That\u2019s 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\u2019s a human kindness. Even though we can be as different as we are\u2014and a lot of people are very different\u2014something like that brings us together. That is what that cinema can do.<\/p>\n

Your work often looks at a specific geographical place, whether it\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

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\u2019t exist. I couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

I was surprised by the score. Maybe it\u2019s my limited imagination, but I expected more electronic sounds. What made you pursue an orchestral score?<\/p>\n

NWR: It was when I\u2019d 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\u2019ve 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\u2019d been using his scores from other films as inspiration. I reached out, he agreed, and I said, \u201cI want you to write an opera, as extravagant as that sounds, that\u2019s what you need to do.\u201d Everything had to be theme-oriented.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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\u2019re 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Private K was a little more esoteric in the sense that, as a character, he comes from the traditions of the Scottish Highlands, this \u201cOne-Eye\u201d 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\u2014he 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.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cOkay, I\u2019ll show you something, and see something of yours\u201d\u2014an exchange. So she showed me an episode of a season that takes place in the \u201950s, and there comes Charles with his hair and leather jacket, and I was like, \u201cIt\u2019s him. That\u2019s Private K. I don\u2019t even need to audition him, let\u2019s just get him.\u201d<\/p>\n

How did he respond?<\/p>\n

NWR: I said cinema needs heroes. What male actor doesn\u2019t want to be an action hero who saves the innocents?<\/p>\n

Making a film about an actress who is making a film adds a new layer around questioning reality. What\u2019s the significance for you of Elle being an actress?<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll make in the future, making a movie just became a natural place. But I didn\u2019t necessarily want to show movie-making. I don\u2019t 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\u2019t fix us\u2014we 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\u2019s a kind of multiple feeling.<\/p>\n

With Candy Floss, you\u2019re mixing pulpy sci-fi with mystical elements. Is this instinctual for you, mixing high and low culture?<\/p>\n

NWR: I love the mix. I mean, that\u2019s exploitation. Exploitation is taking the lowest of the low of the highest of the high and mixing it together. That\u2019s why I never saw exploitation as a negative thing. On the contrary, it\u2019s sometimes the most interesting. It goes back to fairy tales. Fairy tales are a very exploitative format because it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve got various recurring motifs, let\u2019s call them, in the film\u2014including cutting off hands. I\u2019m not going to ask you to explain your symbolism, but what is the impulse to return to these powerful images?<\/p>\n

NWR: I\u2019ve always been obsessed with my hands, for some reason. It\u2019s this thing about touching. I use more hand lotion than what exists in the world. There\u2019s something about hands. Next to the eyes, it\u2019s the feature that speaks [most] to our senses. If you can\u2019t touch with your fingertips, you lose intimacy because it\u2019s 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], \u201cOh, I never thought that it connects like this or connects like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which means it\u2019s always alive.<\/p>\n

NWR: I think that\u2019s the best form of cinema. Who wants to live in the world of dead space?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Contrary to the internet\u2019s belief, filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn\u2019s career did not begin with 2011\u2019s Drive, the Los…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":553942,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-553941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=553941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/553942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=553941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}