It’s not often at Cannes that a director talks about his revival – literally. “Three years ago, I died” Nicolas Winding Refn said a black-tie audience as they cheered at the premiere of his latest film, Her Private Hell. “I was dead for 25 minutes. And it changes you.” The Danish director, who won Best Director at Cannes in 2011 for his electrifying Ryan Gosling thriller Travelreturned to the festival for the first time since then his fashion horror fantasy 2016 The Neon Demon. Like his last film, Her Private Hell (which opens July 24 in the U.S.) is filled with lavish visions of gorgeous young people in peril—this time featuring heartbreak as Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, Christine Froseth AND Diego Calva.
“You look great, Charles,” Refn gushed to Melton at the premiere. “You have a sexy body. I wish I had your body. Diego has a good body,” he continued. “Everybody has great bodies, chicks have great bodies. They’re all so beautiful.”
When he wasn’t watching over his cast, Refn was packing his fists on the red carpet and inspiring his co-stars to join him in getting naked. He was even his own man at the Grand Lumière Theatre, waving his arm like a conductor and urging the crowd to add their applause for him – a fair enough treat for someone who had just cheated death three years earlier.
“Death is very interesting,” Refn explained with nervous laughter the next morning at the film’s press conference. “Before I died, I had come to the end of my career because I had nothing left in me.” He said a doctor had discovered almost by accident that he had a leaky heart valve, which was causing blood to flow backwards into his heart. “I was dying as my lungs were filling up with blood. Two weeks later, I had surgery and thank God the surgeon was Tom Cruise! This guy was beyond genius. He fixed my heart with his hands and I went electric like Frankenstein.”
The moment was a reawakening for the 55-year-old father of two. “When I came back, I realized I had maybe 25 years left. So I was going to make the most of them. How many people in their lives get a second chance? How can I expand my kids’ horizons? How can I expand everyone’s kids’ horizons?” Refni then began to choke up and wiped away tears. “Because it’s for the kids.”
Then again, Her Private Hell is anything but a children’s film, with nightmarish visions of nubile girls being torn apart by a silhouetted black figure with tiny glowing eyes – all set to hauntingly romantic orchestrations by the legendary Italian film composer Dino Donaggio (Don’t look now, Dressed to kill).
Thatcher stars as Elle, a troubled actress whose father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), just married Elle’s friend Dominique (Liu). The two of them, along with an open-eyed named Hunter (Froseth), are making a movie adaptation of a sci-fi comic book series called Candy Floss. The trio is staying in an eerily empty luxury hotel set in a mysterious pink-blue city that is shrouded in fog. And outside lurks a terrifying serial killer called the Skin Man, who is searching for his doomed daughter, finding instead helpless women to tear apart with his diamond-encrusted black-gloved hands. “A myth?” one of the girls thinks. “A monster? A God?”
“I started my career trying to capture authenticity,” said Refn, who first gained attention with gritty impeller trilogy, with a new one Mads Mikkelsen as a low-life thug who navigated the mean streets of Copenhagen. “And I realized after three films that I could never do that, because it doesn’t work. It doesn’t exist in the same way. So I became interested in unreality.”
And after increasingly dreamy projects that include feature films like Bronson AND Only God forgives as well as TV series like Too old to die young and the magical realist The Copenhagen CowboyRefn (who himself stylized his name to simply NWR in his film credits) seems to have abandoned authenticity for a dark take on fairy-tale life. “It’s about human behavior, but set in a world of magic and fantasy where anything is possible,” he said. “And it also now includes aesthetics and fashion, fetish, beauty, ugliness, desire, sex and pain.”
The actors were more than willing to immerse themselves in Refn’s arresting visions, especially Thatcher. “It was one of the most satisfying artistic experiences of my life,” he said Yellow jackets star “It really opened me up in ways I never imagined. It was so stylized, it was so different, it was so quiet.”
Liu agreed. “Nothing is clear; everything is poetic,” she added. “Every answer you want, you get a question. It keeps you in a kind of creative limiting place. I’ve never been challenged in this way before.”
Melton, which Refn discovered when his daughter made him watch Riverdale with him, he was equally smitten. “He’s one of cinema’s greatest auteurs,” he said.
Refn admitted that he’s more interested in rethinking the nature of the narrative so that it more accurately reflects how people take in information in an algorithm-driven, dopamine-driven, scrolling-screen society. Goodbye traditional storytelling, hello feel-driven subconscious — an approach that definitely had its fans at the press conference. “Thank you for a stunning visual masterpiece,” said a Russian journalist. “Many of us had a visual orgasm yesterday.”
Refn’s biggest challenge these days is making sure he’s not rigid in his filmmaking process. “To me, hell is knowing what it’s going to be,” he said. “Because then I don’t know how to do it. I’m only interested in not knowing. Creativity is like liquid. It flows with it. Life exists in the creative space. When you work together is when you’re alive, then when you live. Not knowing is the most exciting thing and knowing is just not very interesting.”
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