Rarely does a Cannes filmmaker talk about his resurrection, in the literal sense of the word. “Three years ago, I died,” Nicolas Winding Refn told a black-tie audience after they cheered at the premiere of his latest film. Her own hell. “You’ve been dead for 25 minutes. This changes you.” The Danish director, who won the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011 for his thriller Ryan Gosling. Drivingreturns to the festival for the first time since his 2016 horror fantasy Neon demon. Like his last movie Her own hell (which opens July 24 in the US) is filled with sumptuous visions of fascinating young people in peril – this time featuring such beloved figures as Sophie Thatcher, Charles Milton, Havana Rose Liu, Christine Froseth, and Diego Calfa.
“You look great, Charles,” Refn said at Milton during the premiere. He continued, “You have a hot body. I wish I had your body. Diego has a good body.” “Everyone has great bodies. Chicks have great bodies. Everyone is so beautiful.”
When Refn wasn’t glancing at the cast, he was pumping his fists on the red carpet and inspiring his actors to join him in the fighting stance. He was even his own hype man at the Grand Lumiere Theater, waving his arm like a conductor and urging the audience to increase their applause for him — a fair enough indulgence for someone who had just cheated death three years earlier.
“Death is very interesting,” Refn explained to nervous laughter the next morning at the film’s press conference. “Before I died, I had reached the end of my career, because I had nothing left.” He said the doctor discovered almost by accident that he had a leaky heart valve, causing blood to back up through his heart. “I was dying because my lungs were filling with blood. Two weeks later, I had surgery, and thank God the surgeon was Tom Cruise! This man was beyond genius. He repaired my heart with his own hands, and I was electrocuted like Frankenstein.”
That moment was a reawakening for the 55-year-old father of two. “When I came back, I realized I might have 25 years left. So I’m going to make the most of it. How many people in their lives get a second chance? How can I broaden the horizons of my children? How can I broaden the horizons of everyone’s children?” Then Raven started choking and wiping his tears. “Because it’s for kids.”
then again, Her own hell Not a children’s film, it boasts nightmarish visions of nubile girls being torn apart by a silhouetted black figure with small, glowing eyes – all set to the haunting romantic orchestration of legendary Italian film composer Dino Donaggio (Don’t look now, Dressed to kill).
Thatcher plays Elle, a troubled actress whose father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), has just married Elle’s boyfriend Dominic (Leo). The two of them, along with a wide-eyed tramp named Hunter (Froseth), are making a film adaptation of a sci-fi comic book series called Candy Floss. The trio stays in a strikingly empty luxury hotel located in a mysterious pink-and-blue city shrouded in fog. Hiding outside is a terrifying serial killer called The Leather Man, who is searching for his distressed daughter, finding instead helpless women to rip off his diamond-encrusted hands and black gloves. “legend?” One of the girls ponders. “A monster? A god?”
“I started my career trying to capture authenticity,” said Refn, who first gained attention for his bravado. pushy trilogy, featuring young Mads Mikkelsen as a lowly thug roaming the streets of Copenhagen. “And I realized after three films that I would never be able to do it, because it doesn’t work. It doesn’t exist in the same way. So I became interested in unreality.”
And increasingly dream projects that include feature films such as Bronson and Only God forgives As well as TV series such as Too old to die young And magical realist Copenhagen CowboyRefn (who himself coined his own nickname to NWR in his film’s credits) seems to have abandoned verisimilitude for a dark fairy tale about life. “It’s really about human behavior, but it’s set in a world of magic and fantasy where anything is possible,” he said. “It now also includes aesthetics, fashion, fetish, beauty, ugliness, desire, sex, and pain.”
The actors were more than willing to dive into Refn’s startling visions, especially Thatcher. “It was one of the most artistically satisfying experiences of my life,” the Yellowjackets star said. “It really opened me up in ways I never imagined. It was so flowery, it was so different, and it was so still.”
Leo agreed. She added: “Nothing is clear cut, everything is poetic.” “Every answer you want, you get a question. It keeps you kind of borderline creative. I’ve never been challenged in that way before.”
Milton, who Raven discovered when his daughter made him watch it Riverdale With her, he was completely in love. “He is one of the greatest auteurs in cinema,” he said.
Refn admitted that he was more interested in rethinking the nature of narrative so that it more accurately reflects how people receive information in an algorithm-driven, dopamine-driven scrolling screen society. Goodbye traditional storytelling, hello subconscious, feeling-driven awareness, an approach that received great admiration at the press conference. “Thank you for this amazing visual masterpiece,” said one Russian correspondent. “A lot of us had a visual orgasm yesterday.”
Refn’s biggest challenge these days is making sure he’s not too rigid about the filmmaking process. “For me, hell is when I know what it’s going to be like,” he said. “Because I don’t know how to do it. I’m only interested in not knowing. Creativity is like a fluid. It flows with that. Life exists in the creative space. When you work together that’s when you’re alive, that’s when you live. Not knowing is the most interesting thing, and knowing isn’t that interesting.”
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