{"id":410719,"date":"2026-07-24T12:26:07","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T12:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/410719\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T12:26:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T12:26:07","slug":"nicolas-winding-refn-talks-about-his-l-a-classic-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/410719\/","title":{"rendered":"Nicolas Winding Refn talks about his L.A. classic ‘Drive’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn is willfully and delightfully unpredictable: part showman, part provocateur. His movies are moody and stylish, dashed with violence and a sense of spiritual grace that often wrongfoots audiences. His 2011 breakthrough, \u201cDrive,\u201d<\/a> starring Ryan Gosling, earned Refn the directing prize when it premiered that year at the Cannes Film Festival.<\/p>\n

It captured the romantic appeal of cruising Los Angeles at night and became nothing less than an immediate local classic<\/a>. Refn\u2019s first movie in America, \u201cDrive\u201d presents Gosling as a nameless young man who works as a mechanic and occasional stunt driver by day, criminal wheelman for hire by night. His quiet, structured existence is thrown into disarray when he befriends his vulnerable neighbor (Carey Mulligan) and her young son and soon their separate worlds collide.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Ryan Gosling in the movie \u201cDrive.\u201d <\/p>\n

(FilmDistrict \/ Bold Films)<\/p>\n

Having spent the better part of the past decade making streaming series \u2014 \u201cToo Old to Die Young\u201d for Amazon and \u201cCopenhagen Cowboy\u201d for Netflix \u2014 Refn has once again returned to cinema. His newest film, the horror-fantasy hybrid \u201cHer Private Hell,\u201d<\/a> starring Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton, opens this weekend.<\/p>\n

In town to promote the movie, Refn will also be appearing on Friday night at American Cinematheque\u2018s Los Feliz Theatre for a 15th anniversary screening of \u201cDrive.\u201d (The show is already sold out, but there will be a stand-by line.) Refn, 55, got on a video call this week while in L.A. to talk about the unlikely impact of \u201cDrive\u201d and some of its more unexpected influences.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Nicolas Winding Refn at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, where \u201cDrive\u201d won him the directing prize.<\/p>\n

(Pascal Le Segretain \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The movie was such a cultural phenomenon when it came out \u2014 the soundtrack was so popular, people wore the scorpion jacket. What do you think audiences were responding to? <\/p>\n

Nicolas Winding Refn: I never look at reasons why. It was just a very magical combustion of many different things that all came together. And I was fortunate enough to have that experience. And I think that trying to reconstruct that experience almost takes away the mystery of it. It was such a collision of multiple layers that you cannot plan, you can\u2019t prepare. I was just incredibly lucky.<\/p>\n

\u201cDrive\u201d was much more romantic than any of your other movies. Did you set out at the time to make your version of a romance? <\/p>\n

Refn: It\u2019s a teenage love story. There was a movie that made an enormous impact on me when I was fairly young in my very early teens, a film called \u201cSixteen Candles.\u201d I don\u2019t know if you remember it. But there was something about the innocence of falling in love that always stayed with me. And I guess \u201cDrive\u201d was my version of that innocence.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan in the movie \u201cDrive.\u201d<\/p>\n

(FilmDistrict)<\/p>\n

When people talk about \u201cDrive,\u201d they often reference tough-guy movies like \u201cThe Driver\u201d or \u201cThief\u201d or \u201cPoint Blank.\u201d But when you talk about \u201cDrive,\u201d you talk about \u201cSixteen Candles\u201d and \u201cPretty Woman.\u201d There\u2019s a tension there that\u2019s really exciting. <\/p>\n

Refn: You always have to try to do something \u2014 not different, but creatively see what other palettes are inside of you. And obviously, I came off \u201cBronson\u201d<\/a> and \u201cValhalla Rising,\u201d which they\u2019re about the alter ego. So for me it was just an extension into \u201cDrive.\u201d And there are certain expectations from what you make before to do it again, but not necessarily in that order. So I purely looked at \u201cDrive\u201d as my love story. <\/p>\n

You\u2019ve spoken about how connected you and Ryan Gosling felt at that time. Where did that come from? <\/p>\n

Refn: We were both naive idealists and we both had an enormous amount of emotions within us that we were trying to find places to unleash. So it was very easy for him to become my alter ego. <\/p>\n

You\u2019ve said you want to make a third movie together. Do you have something specific in mind? <\/p>\n

Refn: Well, it\u2019s something we always talk about whenever we connect. The act of \u201cthrees\u201d is always an interesting odyssey because it kind of cements how you begin and what happens in the middle and then how you end. So we know that we have at least one more movie in us.<\/p>\n

The movie\u2019s vision of Los Angeles isn\u2019t typical: warehouses in the Valley, back alleys in downtown. You were pretty new to the city at that point. How did you find the L.A. of \u201cDrive\u201d? <\/p>\n

Refn: I knew nothing really about L.A.. So when you\u2019re by nature a voyeur, which is what I am in many ways \u2014 I guess a pornographer in ways \u2014 when you come to a place and you see it from an outsider\u2019s perspective, you sometimes see the beauty in the mundane, beauty in the expected. And then when you put your eye on it, you can transform it, even though you\u2019ve passed the same block a thousand times. What may be generic to you can be very exotic to me. And then that becomes exotic because it\u2019s how I see it.<\/p>\n

When I came back to do \u201cThe Neon Demon,\u201d I moved from where I\u2019d been living with \u201cDrive\u201d into another area of L.A. And then when I came back for my show \u201cToo Old to Die Young,\u201d I moved into a third area. L.A. is my favorite place to work in because there are so many diverse opportunities and there\u2019s so much culture and interesting people and interesting performers. It\u2019s an iconography that lives in illusions. I really like working here. <\/p>\n

The success of \u201cDrive\u201d really set you up to have a more straightforward Hollywood career, but it seemed like you turned away from that. Why? <\/p>\n

Refn: Because I didn\u2019t come from that. I prefer my freedom on all levels. What do I want to do? I find more pleasure in living my life like that. Doesn\u2019t mean that I\u2019ve not had wonderful meetings and have worked at good places, but in a way, it was too limiting for me. I needed to be free as a bird and also to do other things. <\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Ryan Gosling in the movie \u201cDrive.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Academy Museum)<\/p>\n

One of the things that really stands out watching \u201cDrive\u201d now is how quiet the movie is and how often we\u2019re just watching Ryan and Carey look at each other. You allow these pauses in between the lines of dialogue. That\u2019s something you\u2019ve taken to even more of an extreme in \u201cHer Private Hell.\u201d What is it you\u2019re exploring in those spaces? <\/p>\n

Refn: How to provoke the soul is through stillness and silence. And so in \u201cDrive,\u201d it was the purity of love. And that\u2019s just at that young age where you are so innocent, it\u2019s all just looking at each other and feeling each other\u2019s presence and falling in love without the complications of a relationship. So that was why the film needed that kind of language. It\u2019s almost boundless. <\/p>\n

And from then on, it became almost like: Could I build a moving installation? Because that\u2019s what an experience is. It\u2019s visiting elements that can penetrate your soul and stay with you and inspire you or push buttons or make you angry or make you happy. So the notion of good or bad doesn\u2019t really exist in that world anymore.<\/p>\n

What do you think when someone approaches you now in a \u201cDrive\u201d scorpion jacket? <\/p>\n

Refn: I think it\u2019s super cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn is willfully and delightfully unpredictable: part showman, part provocateur. His movies are moody…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":410720,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[5817,2303,48,52,51,47,50,49,63,4284,77999,4287,48002,1869,592,1410,164517,62173,164518,315,20967],"class_list":["post-410719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-drive","tag-l-a","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-love","tag-many-way","tag-movie","tag-new-film","tag-night","tag-people","tag-place","tag-refn","tag-ryan-gosling","tag-stand-by-line","tag-time","tag-young"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=410719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410719\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/410720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}