It's the hot new film of the season – a dark, raw thriller with bone-jarring violence – that picked up a surprise win at Cannes for Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (and YouTube immortality for his BBC breakfast TV boo-boo). DONALD CLARKE meets the man behind Drive
WHEN HE WENT to bed last night Nicolas Winding Refn was merely an admired Danish film director with a hot new film buzzing towards cinemas. He was doing well for himself, but he wasn’t likely to find himself trending on Twitter anytime soon.
What do you know? It’s mid-afternoon and Refn is unexpectedly drenched in a very English class of mayfly notoriety.
"I heard, I heard," he says with a sigh. "I heard that it had become some kind of major thing, which is kind of weird." While promoting the smashing Driveon BBC breakfast television, Refn managed to achieve YouTube immortality by casually using the word "fuck". It's a wonderfully cringe-making clip. Bill Turnbill, the Partridgy presenter, apologises frenetically and asks him to "try and make the point without using that word". Actor Carey Mulligan, well aware how these things go down, casts her eyes to heaven.
“I think she thought: here we go again,” he laughs. “It’s hard. If you say to me: ‘You can’t do this’. Then I will think: I have to do this. I have compulsive behaviour as regards certain authoritarian attitudes. If someone says you can’t do that my reaction is I’ve got to do that.” This makes sense. Over the last 15 years, Refn, now a fresh-faced 40, has developed a reputation for combining raw drama with frequent outbreaks of bonejarring violence.
He first attracted attention in 1996 with Pusher, a tale of drug dealing among Copenhagen's less touristy locales, and, after a few missteps, blew sensible minds with recent pictures such as Bronsonand Valhalla Rising. When Drivewas selected for the main competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival, more than a few punters felt it was just populist window dressing.
Starring Ryan Gosling as a getaway driver who – despite existentialist leanings – falls in love with his frail neighbour, this dark thriller never looked like the sort of picture to win snooty awards. Surprise, surprise. At the screening this writer attended the film got a standing ovation and Refn went on to pick up the prize for best director.
“Well, I was frightened because I know how ruthless they can be,” he says. “At the same time, being there was cool. But never think you can walk on water. Never think that. You will fall through.”
Having crawled up at dawn to frighten Bill Turnbill, Refn is starting to sound a bit weary. But, in his dry Scandinavian way, he spreads a class of salty enthusiasm about the room. Driveis looking like a breakthrough picture. The film got rave reviews in the US last week and is doing very healthy business in that territory.
Driveis based on a novel by James Sallis, but it looks and feels very much like a Refn project. The word is that that the treatment had been bandied around a dozen major studios before ending up in his lap.
“It’s basically material that Universal had dropped completely. Ryan approached me about doing something together and I thought it would be a way of working out our mutual obsessions.”
Which are? “I liked the idea of a movie about a man who drives around in a car listening to pop music. Ryan is actually interested in cars. He actually knows about the mechanics of cars. So we were able to marry those fetishes. I don’t have a driver’s license. But I can tell it’s about speed, about the exhilaration of speed.”
As well as having a propulsive noir plot, Drive is also terrifically effective at getting under the skin of Los Angeles. Refn’s surprising discovery was that this supposedly modern city seems trapped in an earlier era.
“Ryan drove me around and showed me where the book took place,” he says.
"It was a great way to be introduced because Ryan knows the city so well. It was a surprise how beautiful it was. But in a strange way, much of it seems trapped in the 1980s. You feel like you have got in a Tardis and gone back to 1984. We were living the life of Driveourselves, but turning it into art."
Refn comes across like a confident sort. This is not altogether surprising. His father, Anders Refn, one of Denmark's most respected editors, worked on such Lars von Trier pictures as Breaking the Waves, Antichristand Dancer in the Dark. One naturally assumes that, coming from that sort of background, Refn was always destined to become a film-maker. Pondering this question, he hums and haws his way towards a sort of acquiescence. Film "grabbed him". It "wooed him". So can he pinpoint the moment that the seduction commenced? "I think I was 14," he says.
"I saw Texas Chain Saw Massacreand realised that cinema was an art. I suddenly knew that's what I wanted to do. I then spent the next 14 years figuring out how to do it." He forswore film school to make Pusher. Largely funded by Nicolas and his family, the picture went on to gather a significant cult following.
Most of the Refn traits are firmly in place: a taste for primary colours; slightly flaky narrative; a taste for lubricious violence.
It is the last characteristic that has, not unsurprisingly, come to be seen as the characteristic Refn USP. When I raise the subject of violence, he groans, weary of explaining that he doesn’t strangle kittens in his spare time.
“I think a lot about the emotion of violence,” he says. “It’s a very primal thing. I realised I was very good at representing it. But I am not at all a violent person. I am a very feminine man. I would never participate in violence. But I am good at it in art. I don’t know why that is. It worries me a little.” Well, there’s nothing to worry about. He seems very personable despite all the cinematic bloodletting. But, yes, you do have to wade through a fair amount of viscera when viewing his collected works.
Attempting to ride the success of Pusher, he travelled to Canada and in 2003 made a strange, sub-David Lynch effort entitled Fear X. He now explains that the experience taught him "everything I shouldn't do on movies".
Now in debt to the tune of $500,000, he returned to the mother lode and developed Pusherinto a trilogy. More blood and guts. In 2008, he surprised Refn watchers by directing a singular film entitled Bronson.
Starring an electrifying Tom Hardy as "the other" Charles Bronson – the violent British prisoner – the film came across like a delightfully unholy combination of an early Ken Russell film and a Christmas pantomime in a lunatic asylum. Where did that come from? "I really didn't have an interest in Bronson," he says. "But I found a way of making a film about myself through him. I needed to cleanse myself. I had to start over again when I had my first child. I had to do the Pushertrilogy for money. Now here was a chance to do something about clearing out my life."
Really? Were there drug problems? Was there booze? He looks so sober now with his horn-rims and tufty hairdo.
“No, no, no. There were no abuses like that. I don’t even drink alcohol.
“It was more about how I felt than about what I did.” He really is a most interesting fellow. He seems remarkably disciplined, but admits to having an anarchic edge. He makes films that seamlessly combine arthouse abstraction with mainstream thrills. Earlier, he said that he was a fetishistic film-maker. What does he mean by that?
“Oh that’s for the psychiatrist,” he says. “Self-analysis is too dangerous. You never know where you might end up.”
