Nicolas Winding Refn: ​‘I’d been given a gift to start over again’

Nicolas Winding Refn returns to the cinema – and from the dead – with a neon-hued fable about the father-daughter relationship from hell. To enter any of the worlds Refn has created, from Drive and The Neon Demon to Pusher and Valhalla Rising, is to experience something truly unique. It may sound odd, considering the filmmaker’s penchant for wearing his influences on his sleeve and often being criticised for his indulgence in imagery, but there’s little like it. Drenched in blue and pink lighting, with characters precisely blocked in exquisite backdrops, and accompanied by dreamlike scores and scenarios, Refn’s work is never short of entrancing

His latest, Her Private Hell, not only serves as a return to feature filmmaking, but also as something of a climax – seemingly everything he adores shoved into a motion picture that is simultaneously grandiose and minimalist. Where his characters descend into an unknown realm, wandering aimlessly in hopes of finding the thing that will fulfil them or remedy the past, Refn himself is a man who is interested in moving forward. And while those figures sometimes barely seem to know how to express themselves, Refn’s self-reflection and willingness to discuss his art and that of others, as well as his past and future, is endless. Our conversation begis in the present, where he has found a new desire to make art after dying and being revived after 25 minutes, but takes us through his entire career and musings on all the art he loves to share with the world.

LWLies: Where did Her Private Hell initially spawn from?

Refn: Well, everything starts with an idea. I’m not the first one to claim that and it’s a very classical answer, but I just knew I wanted to make a film. I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do, but I knew it was going to be a movie. A few years ago, I was dead for 25 minutes and, prior to that, I felt like I’d kind of run my creative course. I’d come to the end of what I wanted to make and had nothing left in me. I’d gone from cinema to streaming and then fell into fine arts, so even though I was on a different path, I had nothing left in me. When I died, it was kind of a blessing in disguise and I realised I’d been given a gift to start over again with a new sense of desire.

It served as a new lease on life for you.

Yeah, and when Tom Quinn at NEON asked what I was planning, I said, ​“It’s a kaleidoscope of everything.” And he said yes. So I had the money in the bank but still didn’t know what it was I wanted to make because I was suddenly looking at everything from a new perspective of having been brought back from the other side. I started thinking about what my introduction to the audiovisual medium was, and the idea of using cinema as a canvas of expression, and it brought me back to my first understanding of what it meant to express and experience emotions, which was television. You know, I came from Copenhagen to New York to live. I was eight, didn’t know a word of English and was dyslexic, so television became my obsession.

I have friends who primarily spoke Spanish who used television as a means of learning to speak English. I’m guessing it was the same for you?

Of course it’s an incredible tool, but what I actually loved most about it was clicking and flipping through channels, because it was almost like a kaleidoscope. Things were analogue back then, so you could just click-click-click on the machine and see all kinds of experiences. So, I thought, what if I made a movie that felt like when I first experienced television, like a dream machine?

The machine that has dreams in it was the foundation, but then I built two main ideas – one was a young girl coming to a city that doesn’t exist and the other was Private K going to hell. They are these opposite spectrums and, to combine them, I needed a similar antagonist to connect them in this triangle. I had the Leatherman in my idea bank, pulled him out of the files and there he was in his black leather gloves with crystals on them, like a glam monster.

He’s very Kenneth Anger coded.

Oh yeah, very Scorpio Rising as a monster, and he gave us the perfect triangle to build within. I hired a wonderful writer who I’d worked with before, Esti [Giordani, trans writer for shows like I Love Dick and Vida], and we began to craft a narrative more specifically around that of father and daughter. That was the framework of the triangle and it was hard work filling that until there was a script I was happy with. The casting was very impactful and, while shooting, it continued evolving like a crystal that kept changing lights until it became what it was. And the essence of what it was was that I realised I’d had the opportunity to make an opera. I’m not a stage person, because I love the audiovisual image too much, but if I could make an opera on film, this would be my version of it.

And it often feels like one – the music, the visuals, the performances – but especially in how much its tragic arc and themes are very operatic.

It’s also all very grandiose and has some of the same fetishistic perversions as Only God Forgives. That was about mother-son, but here it is another side of myself, and I am adding an extra layer of ​“camp” by having this father marrying his daughter’s lover and her becoming a stepmother. We’re putting everyone on these pedestals, including Private K, who becomes both her alter ego and the kind of father she never had, but she also needs to cleanse herself by cutting off the hands of Leatherman.

Hands and eyes feature prominently in your work, and are so often tied to power and the loss of it, whether in Only God Forgives or Her Private Hell, so what draws you to that imagery?

Hands are touch, eyes are what we see, and those two things are my craft. I’ve always been obsessed with my hands in general. When I was little, I forced my mother to put Vaseline on my hands and socks so that when I’d wake up, they were as soft as an infant’s. There’s something about touching and softness that’s almost like being pricked by the senses and, you know, the act of seeing comes in that I am essentially a voyeur. These are senses based purely on emotions.

And people have criticised your films for not being emotional enough or for being ​‘cold’, but I think that comes through in the way you stage and direct these performers. What kind of direction do you give them to strike that balance between the doll-like distance and the operatic emotion?

Well, it depends on the movie. I started my life with the Pusher trilogy, where it was all about capturing authenticity, so the emotions were very much on the sleeves of the performers. It was about connecting with what [the characters] were going through, usually coming from desperation or fear, something that is dramatic. I use genre and fairy tales as a foundation now, but in the beginning, it was more about trying to balance reality and fiction, and I realised at a certain point that I would never really capture reality because it doesn’t exist to be captured.

I then became interested in ​“un-reality” and Bronson and Valhalla Rising were two opposite approaches made in the same six-month period. One has Tom Hardy non-stop talking and the other has Mads Mikkelsen saying nothing. One was theatrical and dealt with the stage while the other was about being in this alien landscape that was very ​“real”.

So your interest became in balancing the natural and unnatural?

Yes, and those two combined with Drive, which was my version of a love story, but set in a kind of noir world, which always adds an extra layer, in my opinion. Great love stories are more interesting in genre films! Look at Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which is set against such a theatrical backdrop and everyone sings their emotions, so it becomes something that isn’t just a ​“kitchen sink” type of realism. I’ve always been intrigued by this notion of one idea becoming another idea and the transformative aspects of creativity. After Drive you go into Only God Forgives, which is even more heightened, because once you go down a path, you can’t go back. You can’t reverse any more, you have to go forward.

That all speaks to how willing you are to evolve as you make more films.

And as you go with age, you change. After those films, it felt like it was time for the women to shine, and that was The Neon Demon. I really enjoyed working with Elle [Fanning], Bella [Heathcote], Abbey [Lee] and Jena [Malone] – I loved that world and those performances and the spiciness to it. It was so much more fun than working with guys. But then the television and streaming landscape became the place to go and, like any seeker, I wanted to see what that canvas could offer. And I made Too Old to Die Young and I realised that these services have a different metric for what they want.

Phenomenal show, but I’m guessing they wanted something easily digestible?

Thank you very much, but yes, it’s a different machine. It was a lesson that made me realise you don’t have to make things that are ​“great”, that ​“good” is fine enough for some. The pandemic then changed a lot of things in our lives – HBO passed on Maniac Cop because the material was too ​“extreme” for them and we were stuck in Copenhagen – so I kept questioning what I could make in the streaming era, and then came Copenhagen Cowboy, which was kind of revisiting my first films but set in a Hans Christian Andersen world of fairy tales, myths, superstition and symbolism. I enjoyed making it in the same way as Too Old but kept questioning the meaning of creativity and what it was supposed to do. From there, I began to work with Prada, which was a whole new realm, like the final summit of the mountain of what someone could do and what obligations they had.

Did that allow you a sense of freedom to play around more than with your shows and features?

Yeah, because I didn’t have the burden of a financial investment that had to return a profit. Of course it’s a business, but what I was doing with Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons was a collaboration that would lead to me making a half-hour movie that had no reason to exist other than me wanting to make it.

And I can imagine it was refreshing to work with your wife and daughters on Touch of Crude.

They were all I had around me – the three most important women in my life – so I realised it was not going to get better than this. And then the situation of my death brought me full circle – dying became a blessing in disguise because I could return to the beginning and try to climb the mountain again. Not as a repetition, but to discover where I was going next.

It’s no longer a Sisyphus situation for you, but now is —

It’s George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. He hits the bottom of his desperation and wants to commit suicide, but sees what life would be like without him and what he contributed and comes back a reformed person. He will continue to be the idealist he was, but he comes with a new perspective. And I think God had a meaningful plan for me, I just didn’t know it yet.

How has it felt navigating the world after that revival? Are you discovering new things about yourself and others?

I, like everyone else in a situation like this, put a lot of value in time now – time has become incredibly relevant to me. I also found that good and bad doesn’t exist in a world where your heart creates, because how can you define that? You can say you like it or not, that’s a difference of opinion, but the polarisation and obsession I have cultivated from people is exciting because I’m doing something that they will remember for ever, and that’s a form of penetration. All great art provokes. It is its purpose.

We’re living in a world where everything is algorithm based and about consumption – shiny objects designed to take our attention away from more relevant things, like human connection and inequality. What’s interesting to me now is that people are afraid or almost violently angered by the two foundations of faith, which are stillness and silence.

That idea of faith and self-exploration as connective tissue makes sense with your work too. Have you always felt like there was a spiritual aspect to it?

All religion is based on being still and silent in order to fully, through your own internal experiences, connect with higher powers, and that’s what creativity is to me. It is there for you to heighten your senses and then, through that, either extract or re-evaluate moral codes, or look at another perspective, or understand other emotions. The most provocative act of aggression lies in this stillness and silence, not in violence or mayhem or sexuality or perversion or politics. And I think the act of creativity itself is a spiritual release. It is a form of exorcism and a cleansing that repeats itself because that desire to cleanse doesn’t stop, so you keep going back again and again.

It’s the ultimate confession.

On repeat. And, I will tell you this, when you face death directly in its eyes, you ask whatever god you believe in for just five more minutes. What you do with that is really a new world.