Thursday, July 5, 2018

Nicolas Winding Refn / 'I bring the singular, the narcissistic, the high art'

Refn with his wife Liv Corfixen in 2012.
Photograph: Richard Young/Rex Features

INTERVIEW

Nicolas Winding Refn: 'I bring the singular, the narcissistic, the high art'

Danny Leigh

Fri 1 July 2016

His films are stylish glitterbombs of sex and death. As The Neon Demon arrives, the director talks about couples therapy, turning down Rihanna – and witnessing a stranger die in an LA parking lot

n an April morning last year in Los Angeles, Nicolas Winding Refndropped his daughter at school and walked into a parking lot. He was shooting a new film, but still scouting locations. The lot stood behind Musso and Frank, the Hollywood steakhouse whose regulars once included Steve McQueen. There, he found a young man on the asphalt, bleeding nightmarishly; another man was hunched over him, trying to staunch the blood. With no one else in sight, Refn attempted to help. It was no good. The man died. Soon the LAPD arrived. He had never seen anyone die before.

He told me this story a few weeks later, still in LA. I asked if he had felt emotional. “No,” he said. Nothing? “Strangely nothing.” The next morning? “Nuh-uh.” He sipped juice through a straw. “But later,” he said, “I was happy. Because I got a fucking great idea for a scene.”

Elle Fanning in The Neon Demon.

Now, a year on, I meet him again in an Italian restaurant in London. The film he was making, The Neon Demon, is about to come out: the story of a 16-year-old model in the feral world of high fashion. To help promote it, Refn has cranked up his own style. Along with his heavy-framed glasses and sharp-cornered haircut is a fitted suit in steel blue. Prada, he says. His Danish accent comes flecked with cartoonish Americanisms (“I still have a punk attitood.”)

The film is a whirl of shiny surfaces that turns to horror, a glossy crazed cousin to Refn’s last LA movie, the neon love story Drive. In the restaurant, we’re barely through the small talk before he is on to his place in modern cinema. “I’m glamour,” he says. “I’m vulgarity. I’m scandal. I’m gossip. I’m the future. I’m the counter culture. I’m commercial reality. I’m artistic singularity.”

Beside us, the waiter smiles politely and asks if we’d like some water. “Thanks,” Refn says.

Yet oddly for such an auteur, some of his most important creative decisions are made elsewhere. Now 45, he has been with his wife, the actor Liv Corfixen, for 21 years. She had been his only girlfriend before they married. “Without her, I would be nothing.” The family – the couple and their two daughters, 13 and seven – move as a unit. The last time Refn made a film, the woozily brutal Only God Forgives, they spent six months in Bangkok, where the children struggled with the climate and schools.

“The therapist said the next move had to be ‘We.’ So I said to Liv, ‘Well, where?’”

The therapist?

“A couples therapist.”

They have been going, he says, for 10 years. I ask whose idea it was and Refn grins. When he does this, his mouth stretches from ear to ear, giving him the endearing look of a Muppet of himself. “Liv initiated it.”

Corfixen asked that the next film be made in California. Then, once Refn outlined his idea, she recommended he cast Elle Fanning, who duly became its star. Corfixen had also proposed Carey Mulligan for her role opposite Ryan Gosling in Drive. Refn says it’s important how professional contacts get on with his family. Vice versa too. While in LA, they entertained the former Twilight star Kristen Stewart. “Liv said: ‘My God, you’re so tiny. You look like a hobbit.’ We haven’t seen her since.”

Ryan Gosling in 2011’s Drive. Photograph: Snap Stills/Rex Shutterstock

After he left the Musso and Frank parking lot, his first reaction was to call his wife. He told her he needed to see her as soon as she could make it, perhaps a little emotional after all. Now, the waiter returns to take our order. Refn is, he says, “on the red carpet diet”. I assume this is a joke, but when I order risotto he tuts. “Carbs.”

Asking about fashion brings more flying adjectives. “It’s glamorous, melodramatic, intoxicating. And sick, disgusting, terrifying.” Inevitably, we reach the moment where two middle-aged men discuss whether his film is misogynist. After many years making films about men – gangsters, prisoners – his first about women doesn’t lack for nudity. But then, he says, that was true with the men too. “It’s a film that gives women control.” Fanning and the other women in the cast were, he says, active collaborators in the story, including the film’s most eye-popping scene, a morgue-set sex scene that breaks new ground in lesbian necrophilia.

The Neon Demon is dedicated to Corfixen. “She thinks it’s my best movie,” he says. “It was a huge relief.” Until now her favourite was the favourite of most people: Drive. Its huge success was a sudden twist in a career mostly spent making films “watched by two people”. He recognises it changed his life. “I know how terrifying LA can be, because I’ve been there as a failure. After Drive, it was the most marvellous place in the universe.”

The other turning point of his life came at eight when his film editor father Anders Refn and cinematographer mother Vibeke Winding relocated to New York. Refn arrived as a dyslexic, speaking no English. By his teens, he was in love with movies, and non-stop 80s Manhattan. “It was a magical period.”

He returned to Denmark at 17. Now, between films, Copenhagen is where he and Corfixen are based. Refn says he has few friends. “It’s a great city for the kids. Clean. Safe. But it’s not my home. It’s my family’s home.”

A cultural faultline runs through him and his movies. “America has no one to catch you when you fall. That makes you want to achieve. It is healthy for the soul. But all that is valued is success.” And Denmark values your humanity? “No, they value you for being equal.” The word sits there, shivering. “I believe in free education, free healthcare. But I do not believe in equality. In Denmark, they call it janteloven. Don’t rise above the crowd. If you say ‘I am the best’, you are punished.”

Refn is frank about his Danish peers; he makes unkind remarks about photogenic director Thomas Vinterberg on roughly an hourly basis. But at this year’s Cannes festival, he took public aim at another Dane, Lars von Trier, accusing him of trying to sleep with Corfixen.

Refn has known Von Trier most of his life. “Lars’ best films are all edited by my father.” Some of the outburst came from real distaste. When I say von Trier too makes films about women, he says: “Yes. He likes to beat and humiliate them.” But it also made sure that in the helium atmosphere of Cannes, Refn grabbed the attention of the media. “I’m a showman.” He grins.

And The Neon Demon is a showman’s film: a glitterbomb of sex and death, made to draw out the pub bore criticism of style over substance. Naturally, there were boos and bad reviews. While a lot of directors will claim they relish hostility, Refn might be telling the truth. “People ask about divided reactions, and I think ‘Don’t you get it yet?’ With the internet, there’s no gatekeeper. There’s just content. So to survive, it doesn’t come down to what you do. It comes down to what you represent. And being talked about.”

Refn always had that knack. I met him in the 90s, at the time of his first two films, the Copenhagen street dramas Pusher and Bleeder. He was more brittle then, less fun. But even then he could work a journalist; useful if you want to make films as strange as his and still end up in a Prada suit.

He himself volunteers that he can’t make a living from his movies. That comes from advertising, from Gucci, Hennessy cognac, Lincoln cars. “They hire me because I bring the singular, the narcissistic, the high artistic endeavour...”

Is there anything he wouldn’t advertise? “Soft drinks. Fast food. I will not do anything aimed at children.” He might almost pass for a wholesome Danish socialist. “You have to have values.”

These were also why he never worked with Rihanna. He says he was approached to direct the video for her single Bitch Better Have My Money; already dubious about the title, he met her and decided that, while she was “sweet”, she “wanted the video to be violent without the pain of violence”. Instead, he pitched an idea in which he would co-star, playing a big-league movie director. “They didn’t like that.”

Mads Mikkelsen and Kim Bodnia in Refn’s 1996 feature debut Pusher. Photograph: Ronald Grant

Back in his teens, Refn had barely left New York before returning to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He trained to be an actor. A year later, he was expelled for hurling a table against a wall while improvising. Was he angry as a young man? “I was ambitious without focus.” Did he really want to be an actor? “No. I just felt I was special.”

Refn is unsentimental about people he works with. “We move on. Let’s not kid ourselves.” But he does get misty-eyed about Ryan Gosling and Elle Fanning. “Me and Ryan, we’re mother’s boys.” And Fanning? “Elle has the thing that marks her out. You’re born with the thing. You can destroy it or you can work it like a muscle. I know what I’m talking about. I have the thing too.”

The charge sometimes thrown at Refn is that his films are adolescent. He doesn’t take it as an insult. The thought of 15 year olds watching The Neon Demon on their phones excites him. “You can be more bold and abstract now, because the young are so smart. Older people complain about their attention span, but in fact kids just understand everything faster.”

THE GUARDIAN