“Every great movie has
five things: violence, romance, a great cast, American mythology, and a 90
minute running time.” So says Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish director known
for his violent and meticulous films Bronson and Valhalla Rising. His
latest film, Drive, is his American
debut, and stars Ryan Gosling as a LA Driver who does movie stunts by day and
robberies by night (read the review here). Filled with a 1980s grunge sensibility smashed with a high-art European style, Mr. Winding Refn won the award for Best Director at Cannes
for his film. He spoke after a screening last night at Brooklyn Academy of
Music’s Bamcinematek. Here is a sampling of the insights he brought to his
creative process, as well as the greatest bromance ever told:
Mr. Winding Refn
almost killed Harrison Ford:
I was in LA
working on a movie with Harrison Ford called The Dying of the Light. It was a wonderful script about a CIA agent
who goes on an existentialist journey and then dies at the end. If I could do a
movie where Harrison Ford dies, I could contribute to society. I had gone to
Los Angeles to work with him. We would hang out, but then he was like he doesn’t
want to die. But then there’s no movie, Harrison! I was so angry for buying
into the illusion of Hollywood, I didn’t want to do it.
On how him and Mr.
Gosling had the worst first date ever, which led to the project:
Out of the
blue, I got a call from Ryan Gosling asking if I wanted have dinner with him. I
had never met him, so I was like why not?—if Harrison doesn’t want to die,
maybe you want to die. The only problem was I had a very high fever because I
had gotten sick on the plane. Harrison got me these anti-flu drugs that they
have in this country that helped put the fever down, but the only problem is
they made you as high as a kite. So I’m stoned out my mind and I got to meet
Ryan. That morning a script had arrived
from Universal, written by Hossein Amini called Drive, but I didn’t read it because I was so stoned. So I went to
dinner and I was the chair. I couldn’t
turn, so I was sitting in profile because I couldn’t move…This man had an aura
of an unbelievable proportion. He was very interested in how I make my films
and had seen all of them, and was very enthusiastic. I was feeling very
euphoric so halfway through I say will you please take me home. It was like a
blind date gone wrong! He said sure, I’ll drop you off. So this dinner which
hadn’t amounted to anything but “you’re great, I’m great, yea!” We’re sitting
in the car, driving along the freeway in Santa Monica, which is a very long
ride, in silence—blind date gone wrong, and no action. So we turn on the radio
and its soft rock, REO Speedwagon’s “I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore.” So
here I am with Ryan Gosling and “I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore” and you
know when you’re high you need to turn the music really, really loud. And I’m
getting into the song. I’m from the 80s, and I remember this pop ballad, so I
start singing along. And I can’t sing to save my life, and Ryan Gosling is
driving this car, not saying a single word. And guys we’re pretty weak when we’re
ill. So I’m missing my family and my kids and Harrison Ford won’t die, so I
start to cry. Tears are rolling down my cheek and it’s flowing out of me and
Ryan is just sitting in the car driving. I’m a Finnish filmmaker so I make
films based on what I like to see and ideas come to me in the strangest of
places, but right there I had an idea to do a movie. I turn to Ryan for the
first time and he’s a very good looking man, and I scream at him, since the
music is so loud, “I got it man! We’re gonna make a movie about a man who
drives around at night, in a car, listening to pop music, cause that’s his
emotional relief!” Ryan turns to me and looks at me and says, “Cool…I’m in.”
On going independent:
I went back
and read the Universal material and it was great but it wasn’t my kind of
movie, and I read the novel by James Sallis, which is a wonderful piece of literature.
I wanted to make the book, cause it’s very different from what Universal was
making, which was a $60 million franchise. It had no stuntman story and a lot
of sex and it was gonna be Hugh Jackman. Ryan and I wanted to do it so I
started changing the script so it could be something I could work with, and
Universal didn’t want to do it. So we went to independent financing and it was
very little budget, but that was great because that’s what I was used to, and I
could control that.
On the inspiration for
the film:
I’m a child
of cinema of course, so I’m exposed to cinema, but I was really influenced by
Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I had been reading Fairy Tales to my daughter a few years
before and a lot of stories are based on them, like Pretty Woman, where you take a very dark theme and basically change
the concept. And this movie is basically making a movie about a man who’s
psychotic. So you start the film with a love story about purity like a John Hughes
movie, and then he turns psychotic and kills everybody, it’s like a scream
movie…It was an incredible experience—it was not an expensive movie, and we
only had seven weeks to shoot the entire film, including all the action. The
script I wrote at the end with Hossein was about 88 pages, and we ended up
shooting about 60 of them. I was cutting out dialogue constantly.
On the film’s hyper-stylized
lighting:
I’m
actually color blind, so everything has to be in contrast. This is heightened
reality, so you should use your tools to underscore that. You have to find that
balance where it doesn’t become stylization. There’s a difference between
stylish and stylized. Stylish is something that comes out of an emotion. You
have a thought and you want to represent it in a stylish way. Stylization is
you come up with a concept and you try to hold this emotion that comes out of
it.
On why he constantly
hugged Ryan Gosling:
Ryan’s
dialogue was so reduced, which can be difficult for an actor. When you take
away their dialogue, you handicap the actor and take away their movement…So
they have to use parts of their body to communicate, which is harder than it
looks. But a way to do that is to keep everything inside, so gestures and moves
tells the story. But very quickly, people compensate, and move master, and
bigger, and more facial gestures, where they try to emulate something. But
because we’re making a movie, the camera sees,
it’s enlarged basically. So with Ryan, because he’s such a unique actor, all
you had to do is go over and hug him and hold onto him until he would let into
the hug. And I would say, “Keep it all inside, and go with God.”
On the film’s 80s
music and electronic score:
I wanted a
very electronic score in the movie because it would underscore that Driver is
half-man, half-machine, and he drives a machine that’s an antique, and an
electronic score would have a craft and sound that’s a very feminine pop from
the masculine interior of the car. Art is essentially based on two emotions:
sex and violence. The further you can pull them apart, the further tension you
pull between them. So it was having the feminine side of the music combined
with the extremely masculinity of the car world and the stunt world, and the mythological
America hero, which is very masculine…There wasn’t a fight, nobody liked [the
music]! They were Americans and they were like “What the fuck is this? How
about Moby?” They wanted Chemical Brothers, which is so 90s. They wanted
something youth sounding. In the end, they saw the light. Now, cause everyone
loves it!
On the influence of
Walter Hill’s The Driver, which has
some similar plot elements:
I had never
seen [The Driver] because it’s very
hard to get on DVD so I got in LA when I was shooting the movie. But I think
Sallis had seen it and that was the inspiration for the book. So in a way I was
ripping off the movie without having seen it.
On hi strange
relationship with Alejandro Jodorowsky, director of El Topo and The Holy Mountain:
I’m very
close with Alejandro, and I had gone to Paris last year to be christened by him
as a spiritual son. There he gave me a tarot reading on the movie. And he said
you will travel with the film, and before I left, I said what should I do if
they come at me in Hollywood, if they try and change the movie from me. And he said
just smile and nod. I did a lot of smiling and nodding and it worked.
On using graphic
violence and the laughter it can provoke:
Anything
graphic at that level will provoke laughter because it is absurd and bizarre
and far out. So that will be a natural reaction. We did a screening at New York Times club and it was seniors
and there was no laughter. So I think it depends on who you are. But any
reaction to it is an interesting reaction. I guess I’m attracted to violence
because it’s my fetish. There’s something very cinematic about it and primal,
so I try to make it emotionally engaging. Violence works like sex—it’s all about
the build up to the climax. The better the foreplay, the better the payoff is
going to be. And violence has the same DNA. It has to be very graphic because
it digs into hyper reality, and that goes back to the Grimm’s Fairy Tales with
the retribution factor.
On eliminating the
back story from the novel:
I eliminated all his back story because I wanted him to be a
mythological character. Not having a past made him a mystery, an enigma, and he
represented the needs of the other characters—they all needed to have a reason
to have a driver in their lives. But it also made him more romantic, more pure
because you would interpret his behavior as more of an enigma. When he becomes
more violent and dangerous, it’s more surprising and scary because you never
saw it coming. There is a kind of sense this is a transformation movie. Nobody
offered me any of the superhero movies in Hollywood, so I went and made one
myself. So I wanted to make a movie about someone who transformed himself into
a superhero at the end, and whatever comes of that.
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