Nico­las Wind­ing Refn: ​‘I want­ed to make a film about the 16-year-old girl inside me’

Is Nico­las Wind­ing Refn a fem­i­nist? How­ev­er you define that increas­ing­ly ambigu­ous term, it’s not an ide­ol­o­gy that’s syn­ony­mous with the Dan­ish writer/​director. Which is under­stand­able, giv­en that he tends to make vis­cer­al, fetishis­tic films about vio­lent men. And yet the signs are all right there in his work. Take Val­hal­la Ris­ing, which pits Mads Mikkelsen’s one-eyed Viking war­rior against pagan cru­saders in a pri­mor­dial world con­spic­u­ous­ly devoid of women. Or his best known film to date, Dri­ve, where Ryan Gosling’s strong-silent anti­hero res­cues Carey Mulligan’s abused sin­gle moth­er. Or Only God For­gives, about a man chained to the womb of his moth­er, in which Refn simul­ta­ne­ous­ly decon­structs and fem­i­nis­es the homo­erot­ic under­tow that sim­mered under the hood of Dri­ve. Pow­er pro­tects puri­ty. In the 20 years he’s been mak­ing movies, rarely has Refn strayed from this core theme – these hyper­mas­cu­line alter egos allow him to explore the world and the dif­fer­ent roles men and women play with­in it. All of which brings us to The Neon Demon…

In Refn’s tenth fea­ture, Elle Fan­ning plays a young mod­el named Jesse who arrives in Los Ange­les dream­ing of mak­ing it in the fash­ion world. Fresh-faced and vul­ner­a­ble, she’s a lamb wait­ing to be devoured in an indus­try run by wolves. The Neon Demon is the first Nico­las Wind­ing Refn film to be told almost exclu­sive­ly from a female per­spec­tive. The pri­ma­ry sup­port­ing cast of Jena Mal­one, Abbey Lee and Bel­la Heath­cote set an omi­nous tone by chan­nelling the Weird Sis­ters from Shakespeare’s ​‘Mac­beth’. With this flipped per­spec­tive in mind, does Refn see the film as a depar­ture from his pre­vi­ous work? Not exact­ly. ​“I always want­ed to make a film about the 16-year-old girl inside of me.”

Wait… what?

“I’ve always felt that every man has a 16-year-old girl inside them, and I want­ed to make a movie about mine. Going from Dri­ve to re-enter­ing my mother’s womb in Only God For­gives, I lived out that fan­ta­sy, so now I can make a movie from the point of view of the teenage girl inside of me. It’s like being reborn.”

Refn clear­ly gets a rise out of being provoca­tive, yet when inter­view­ing him you get the impres­sion that he some­times feels mis­un­der­stood. The last time we spoke, when Only God For­gives was busy polar­is­ing crit­ics at the 2013 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, he was quick to dan­gle a juicy line about want­i­ng to ​“fuck the audi­ence”. For bet­ter and worse, Refn got his wish that year. But it always felt like he was putting up a front, a well-rehearsed reac­tion to the reac­tion rather than an hon­est state­ment of intent. Now, over open sand­wich­es and pick­led her­ring in a trendy Copen­hagen restau­rant close to Refn’s home, he seems com­par­a­tive­ly relaxed when the con­ver­sa­tion turns to neg­a­tive crit­i­cism. Is he as thick skinned as he likes to appear? ​“Of course not,” he admits, ​“but it all depends how many neg­a­tive reviews there are and whether they affect the box office. With Only God For­gives, I was so pos­i­tive I was gonna get the Palme d’Or, you know, they might as well have just mailed it to me.”

He flash­es a wry smile. ​“It didn’t work out like that. So on a finan­cial lev­el, yes, I was wor­ried, but on a per­son­al lev­el it was like, ​‘Well, now I’m the Sex Pis­tols,’ because the kids loved it, the estab­lish­ment hat­ed it. Who the fuck wants to make films for old peo­ple, you know? What’s great is the peo­ple who real­ly hat­ed Only God For­gives are still talk­ing about it. ​‘Ching ching!’ I make films pure­ly based on what I want to see, but if it makes mon­ey then I’m gonna get to do the next one. I just approach every­thing like, ​‘How lit­tle can I make this for?’ It’s a healthy thing, I think, because it allows you cre­ative free­dom. If you make it exact­ly how you want to make it, that’s the one thing they can’t take away from you.” How, then, would Refn react if The Neon Demon was uni­ver­sal­ly adored? ​“Fuck, I made it wrong.”

In essence The Neon Demon is about the mys­ti­cal pow­er of women, who to Refn are ​“the cen­tre of the uni­verse.” But it’s also an ode to emo­tion­al­ly strong, super­fi­cial­ly beau­ti­ful women. When viewed in this light, Refn’s deci­sion to adopt a female alter ego takes on a more per­son­al sphere of mean­ing. Where he ded­i­cat­ed Only God For­gives to cult Chilean sur­re­al­ist Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky (who Refn received tarot read­ings from every week­end dur­ing the pro­duc­tion on The Neon Demon), his lat­est is ded­i­cat­ed to Liv Cor­fix­en, Refn’s wife. In 2014 Liv made a film called My Life Direct­ed by Nico­las Wind­ing Refn, doc­u­ment­ing the family’s tem­po­rary relo­ca­tion to Bangkok for the film­ing of Only God For­gives. Out­ward­ly, Refn comes across as assertive and full of con­fi­dence, but this inti­mate home movie reveals a dif­fer­ent side to him. Appar­ent­ly racked with anx­i­ety and self-doubt, he ques­tions vir­tu­al­ly every cre­ative deci­sion he makes and vis­i­bly cracks under the added strain of hav­ing Liv and their two young daugh­ters around. As fas­ci­nat­ing as it is to see Refn exposed in this way, the fact that he put him­self under intense pres­sure in pur­suit of artis­tic ful­fil­ment and com­mer­cial suc­cess is hard­ly sur­pris­ing giv­en his career trajectory.

Refn’s brief and dis­as­trous flirt with Hol­ly­wood in the ear­ly 2000s is well doc­u­ment­ed, but as as a valu­able cau­tion­ary tale for aspir­ing direc­tors every­where it’s a sto­ry that’s worth retelling. After turn­ing heads with two styl­ish micro-bud­get street thrillers, 1996’s Push­er and 1999’s Bleed­er, Refn arrived in Los Ange­les with fame firm­ly in his sights. Fear X didn’t so much crash and burn as stall on the grid, bank­rupt­ing Refn’s pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny Jang Go Star and leav­ing him in mas­sive per­son­al debt (at one point he owed his bank $1m). ​“That film failed on every lev­el,” he reflects, ​“and it deserved to fail on every lev­el. Even the title was bad. At the time I thought I was mak­ing what would be per­ceived as the great­est film ever made. It turned out to be the exact oppo­site. But I was mak­ing a movie about my ego. It was all about van­i­ty and what I thought a good film was sup­posed to be. When it failed, what­ev­er I had before just evaporated.”

He con­tin­ues: ​“I thank God every day for allow­ing me to fail once. If it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t have gone to Eng­land, I wouldn’t have done Bron­son and we prob­a­bly wouldn’t be here hav­ing this con­ver­sa­tion. Fail­ure – I’m talk­ing earth­quake-lev­el fail­ure – teach­es you two things: it’s not the end of the world, and are you gonna man up or give up? I will nev­er be bit­ter in my life, I will not allow that. So I had to man up. It was also around the same time that we had our first child, so I real­ly had no choice but to take responsibility.”

Was the fear of fail­ure there on The Neon Demon? ​“Oh yeah, it’s con­stant,” Refn con­fess­es. ​“It’s like get­ting my peri­od: I know it’s going to come and when it does I’m going to bitch and moan about it. But you can nev­er show it to any­one. Not the crew or the cast. Only Liv sees that. When I get through it I feel relieved and full of life. I always think cre­ativ­i­ty is very fem­i­nine. It’s the clos­est I can ever get to being a woman. The idea of hav­ing some­thing inside of you that can cre­ate life, men can nev­er obtain that.” This sense of mater­nal­ism informs more than just Refn’s cre­ative process. While he describes him­self as ​“a com­plete ego­ma­ni­ac” and ​“total­ly sadis­tic” at work, by con­trast he acknowl­edges that he feels ​“masochis­tic, very dom­i­nat­ed” at home. So just how big an influ­ence is Liv, both per­son­al­ly and pro­fes­sion­al­ly? ​“She’s every­thing,” he says. ​“We’ve been togeth­er 20 years, she’s the only girl­friend I ever had. I came straight out of my moth­er into her. I’ve nev­er known anoth­er woman. On this movie, I would nev­er have come up with the idea if I didn’t have a beau­ti­ful wife. I’m not born beau­ti­ful. I’m not hand­some. But she is. I’ve always won­dered what it’s like to be so lucky. In a way, every­thing comes back to her.”

Phys­i­cal per­fec­tion is a key motif in The Neon Demon. It’s what sep­a­rates Jesse from the oth­er female char­ac­ters, each of whom obses­sive­ly craves the one, intan­gi­ble thing they can nev­er take from her. Some­thing com­mon­ly referred to as ​‘It’. ​“You can’t put your fin­ger on it,” Refn elab­o­rates, ​“you can’t define it, you can’t imi­tate it. That’s what hav­ing ​‘It’ means.” Not every­one has ​‘It’, but Elle Fan­ning does. In order to tell this invert­ed fairy tale of vir­gin­i­ty and the city, Refn recalls being faced with two options when it came to cast­ing Jesse: ​“Either it was going to be an unknown actress or it was going to be Elle Fan­ning. I hadn’t seen a lot of the films she had been in but Liv had seen one of her more recent ones and said she was ter­rif­ic. She’s very fas­ci­nat­ing to look at. She read a draft script and we met and talked a lit­tle bit about it. She was the only one I want­ed so I asked her very nice­ly and luck­i­ly she said yes.”

Read our inter­view with Elle Fan­ning exclu­sive­ly in LWLies 65

But land­ing the per­fect lead wasn’t enough. Refn knew that if the film was ever going to work, it need­ed a female touch. So he turned to cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Natasha Braier (XXY, The Rover), who he hails a ​“rev­e­la­tion” for her atten­tion to detail and eye for fram­ing, and hired a pair of rook­ie screen­writ­ers. ​“There’s a big dif­fer­ence between men writ­ing women and women writ­ing women,” he explains. ​“I want­ed to bring in two play­wrights to help me with the female dia­logue. First I went to Eng­land and hired Pol­ly Sten­ham, who’s a great writer and a love­ly woman. I worked with her for a cou­ple of months, but it wasn’t com­plete yet. So I moved on and went to the US where I hired an unknown play­wright out of Yale called Mary Laws. Both were instru­men­tal in real­is­ing the female char­ac­ters. I would say, for exam­ple, ​‘This bath­room scene, how would girls talk here?’ and Mary would go away and write a few vari­a­tions of how girls would talk and I would take what I liked and edit it from there. That’s why I didn’t want screen­writ­ers – it had to be play­wrights, peo­ple who could real­ly write char­ac­ters. The last thing I want­ed to do was make a movie about how men see women.”

On a sub­con­scious lev­el, The Neon Demon deals with male infe­ri­or­i­ty, the anx­i­ety and fear that stem from a fun­da­men­tal lack of under­stand­ing about female sex­u­al­i­ty. At the same time as the film entered pre-pro­duc­tion, Refn began edit­ing a cof­fee table book com­pris­ing his per­son­al col­lec­tion of vin­tage exploita­tion movie posters. ​‘The Act of See­ing’ is a trea­sure chest of trash, crammed with tit­il­lat­ing graph­ic teasers for obscure cult erot­i­ca such as Revenge of the Vir­gins, Val­ley of the Nymphs and Aqua Sex. Refn says that putting the book togeth­er pro­vid­ed as a vital source of inspi­ra­tion. ​“Every time I was cre­ative­ly stuck I would go back and look through it. It’s both a book about putting women on pedestals for the pur­pos­es of wor­ship and also degrad­ing, molest­ing and muti­lat­ing them.”

In past inter­views Refn has revealed that his films always start out with a sin­gle image, some­thing that arous­es and excites him. Only God For­gives was of a man look­ing down at his hands and very slow­ly balling them into fists. Bron­son and Dri­ve are root­ed in some­thing dark­er. The seed for The Neon Demon? A young girl draped across a cast­ing couch, drenched in her own blood. This gris­ly image, which feels plucked straight out of ​‘The Act of See­ing’, sets up the film as a scathing satire of the fash­ion indus­try. But more than this, The Neon Demon is a com­ment on the com­modi­ti­sa­tion of beau­ty and how our con­sumer ori­ent­ed cul­ture feeds on youth and puri­ty (“real ​‘Loli­ta’ shit,” as Keanu Reeves’ seedy motel man­ag­er puts it).

“I’m very inter­est­ed in this idea of how we val­ue beau­ty,” says Refn. ​“You look back through the his­to­ry of mythol­o­gy and it’s always, ​‘She was so beau­ti­ful that wars were fought,’ ​‘He was so strong that he took down entire armies with his bare hands.’ Now beau­ty has sur­passed strength as the ulti­mate social cur­ren­cy. It’s always been a ris­ing stock, it’s nev­er gone down, but now with the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion it’s reached an unsus­tain­able lev­el. I think the inter­net is the best inven­tion since women, but it’s a cor­rup­tive force also. We live in a very sex­u­alised soci­ety. Men want to sex­u­alise youth, women want to con­sume it. If you’re 25 you’re not 17, but what hap­pens when you’re 17 and you’re not 14? It’s going in that direc­tion whether we like it or not. It’s scary, espe­cial­ly when you have two young girls who are start­ing to expe­ri­ence the world. In Den­mark we have a very open atti­tude towards sex and sex­u­al­i­ty. We teach sex. But when we were in LA doing the movie, you could see that a lot of the par­ents were very moral­ly pro­tec­tive of their chil­dren because of what they’re exposed to. It was a real eye opener.”

He’s talked about birth, men­tioned men­stru­a­tion and revealed how women are the cen­tre of his world. He’s cri­tiqued mod­ern society’s shal­low com­pul­sion, and made a film that sub­verts the male gaze. So, is Nico­las Wind­ing Refn a fem­i­nist? ​“I know there’s a lot of talk about gen­der equal­i­ty – I actu­al­ly believe that if more women were in pow­er the world would be a bet­ter place – but it’s still all about whether you’re thin enough, tall enough, more beau­ti­ful than the next girl, do you have high cheek­bones? Every year there’s always a big debate in the media because young girls aren’t being exposed to the right kinds of role mod­els, but noth­ing real­ly changes. It’s like we’re wash­ing our con­science, but then as soon as we feel good about our­selves the wolves start cir­cling again.

“We all say it’s what inside that counts, and we all want to mean that, but life doesn’t work like that. There’s the way we know we should behave and what we define as good com­mon sense, and then there’s human instinct which is ter­ri­fy­ing. Like, I’m sur­round­ed by so much beau­ty, and I’m very envi­ous not to be a part of that. But I’m extreme­ly for­tu­nate because I have very beau­ti­ful chil­dren. It fucks with your brain to even think like that and it’s the worst thing to say as a par­ent, to even utter those words, but believe me, it goes through everyone’s minds. Women’s lives are so much more com­plex though. Guys have it so much eas­i­er. It must be so crazy being a woman.”