Taking the Best Director prize at Cannes pretty much guarantees a lifetime pass at the festival for a filmmaker. Nicolas Winding Refn has consistently found a home on the Croisette following his big win in 2011 for Drive, scoring key Competition slots for his last two features, and now he’s booking plane tickets once again.
While the official selection won’t be announced until Thursday morning, Deadline confirmed today that Refn’s upcoming miniseries Too Old to Die Young will indeed bow at Cannes next month before appearing on Amazon in June.
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Refn will return to the Los Angeles of The Neon Demon with his newest project, a crime epic trawling through the city’s seedy Russian, Japanese, and Mexican underbellies. Miles Teller and Billy Baldwin lead us on this tour through a lawless hell, leading a cast that also includes Jena Malone, John Hawkes, and Callie Hernandez.
Cinema purists may take the appearance of a TV series – even one from a big-name auteur – on the Cannes docket as a sign of the apocalypse, but let’s not forget that Twin Peaks: The Return opened at the festival two short years ago. Let’s also keep in mind that each “episode” of this “series” will be ninety minutes long, calling both classifications into question.
Audiences at Cannes may wonder at what point TV turns into movies while drinking in what looks from the trailer to be another typically Refn-esque joint, with all the splotches of lurid color and severed body parts that implies.
Too Old to Die Young comes to Amazon on 14 June.
