Interview: Nicolas Winding Refn on The Neon Demon

Director Nicolas Winding Refn has divided audiences with his controversial new film The Neon Demon. Back in June, the Danish filmmaker joined us for a very special preview and post-screening chat. Miss out? Read a segment of our Q&A below and listen to some audio from the evening…

The Neon DemonWhat films did you look at when making The Neon Demon – both in terms of what you wanted to reach out to and what you wanted to try and avoid?

NWR: Well I think people read into whatever they want and I’m sure many parallels can be drawn which is fine. I just make films based on what I would like to see and I don’t really care where it comes from except if it comes from my own imagination. I was probably inspired by something or I read or heard something that I found interesting. I shoot my films in chronological order because it forces me to be as instinctual as I possibly can. I love the collaboration with actors or other crew members and just the constant open potential of what this is going to become but I’m also extremely self absorbed. In the end, I can only relate to myself and in a way everything has to lead back to me so I would say this film is about my own fantasy, partly about being a 16-year-old-girl which every man has inside of him.

Your films are often quite male dominated. Was it a conscious effort to make something with more female characters?

NWR: I’ve been very fortunate to work with Mads Mikkelsen, Tom Hardy and Ryan Gosling. All very wonderful collaborations and sometimes multiple versions but the other day I was talking about this 16-year-old girl inside of me very obsessively because at home I’m very dominated by women in that I’m very obedient and I submit myself. When I work I’m very sadistic and I embrace that part of myself but when I’m home I’m very masochistic and I give in to that. So one of my constant obsessions of what it would be like being born beautiful at 16 must have been really interesting and the idea of wanting to make a horror film about it comes probably from many reasons. I wasn’t born beautiful but my wife and my kids are beautiful and they’re all women or girls. This person said to me ‘Right, let’s look at it from a more analytical point of view – so with Drive you reach a height of male fetish, right?’ I was like ‘Yeah, that sounds about right,’ and they go ‘Okay – A little bit of homoeroticism?’ – Yeah, okay I admit that. That’s very fetishised. And they go ‘Okay, so Only God Forgives is the exact opposite – it’s all about emasculating and being impotent and essentially crawling back into the womb of the mother,’ and I was like ‘Yeah, that’s pretty much what the film was about, partly,’ and they go ‘Well great, then The Neon Demon is about you being re-born as this 16-year-old girl, it just feels so natural, doesn’t it?’ In a way it cleared a lot of things inside of me. It was like, yeah, I guess this was the time to make this film.

It’s very accurate in its portrayal of vacuousness – Almost an analogy for LA and Hollywood. Was that intentional?

NWR: I’ve never worked in Hollywood but I’ve met Hollywood. I wanted to make a movie about the obsession of beauty and I thought what if this was to be a horror story? This subject is very complex because everyone has an opinion about it – some people call it shallow and other people can give a twenty minute analysis to what it means to our evolution – it’s a five billion person subject but what’s interesting to me is that this obsession of beauty that just continues to rise and rise and rise at the same time that the longevity of beauty continues to shrink and shrink and shrink and everything just becomes younger. That, to me, is a frightening analysis of what’s going to happen. Is everyone going to essentially eat each other up because it just becomes like a circular devouring? I don’t know but I think that was the horror introduction to it and then of course you had to add all the other elements of melodrama and camp and humour and glitter and vulgarity that comes with that. Then I would take the three antagonists and divide them up, each representing a certain specific thing that they want from Elle. So in a way the Jesse (Fanning) character is very similar to the origins of like One-Eye or the Driver or the Lieutenant – she’s still that kind of catharsis for everyone else throughout the movie,

The Neon DemonA big part of your music is the score. What was it like working with Cliff Martinez again?

NWR: Well Cliff Martinez is absolutely unique. He was one of the founders of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he played with Captain Beefheart but then started scoring films with Steven Soderbergh and really became his partner. I hired him for Drive and that was such a five week, quick experience but it was so great and it was my first time working with a composer so we just clicked in a way that started a collaboration that became very intense. He’s the first person, or people, that I involve in what I want to do, from even an idea stage, and we talk about the music and what would be interesting this time around. He did the music for my wife’s documentary too, so it suddenly became like a family thing. He’s very instrumental in shaping the movies.

Want to hear more from Nicolas Winding Refn? Have a listen to a further segment of our Q&A with him here…

The Neon Demon is now showing. Find out more and book tickets here.

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