It’s not often at Cannes that a filmmaker talks about his awakening—literally. “Three years ago, I died,” Nicolas Winding Refn told a black audience after cheering the premiere of his latest film, His Private Hell. “I died for 25 minutes. And that changes you.” Danish director, who received the Best Director Award of Cannes in 2011 for his exciting performance of Ryan Gosling. Callwas back at the festival for the first time since his 2016 fashion horror fantasy The Neon Demon. As his last film, His Private Hell (opening July 24 in the US) is filled with brilliant visions of beautiful young people in danger—this time featuring heartthrobs like Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth and Diego Calva.
“You look good, Charles,” Refn teased Melton during the premiere. “You have a sexy body. I wish I had your body. Diego has a beautiful body,” she continued. “Everyone has big bodies. Chicks have big bodies. Everyone is so beautiful.”
When he wasn’t watching his actors, Refn was putting his fists on the red carpet and encouraging his actors to join him in the pugilistic pose. He was his own man at the Grand Lumière Theatre, raising his arm like a conductor and encouraging the crowd to applaud him—enough indulgence for someone who had just cheated death three years ago.
“Death is very interesting,” Refn explained to nervous laughter the next morning at the film’s press conference. “Before I died, I had come to the end of my work, because I had nothing left in me. He said the doctor found almost by mistake that he had a leaky heart valve, causing blood to back up in 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 boy was beyond his wits. He mended my heart with his hands, and I was electrified like Frankenstein.”
This time was a rebirth for the 55-year-old father of two. “When I came back, I realized I probably had 25 years left. So I was going to waste it. How many people in their lives get a second chance? Refn then began to choke and wipe away tears. “Because it’s for children.”
Then again, His Private Hell it’s not just a kid’s movie, boasting harrowing visions of little girls being ripped apart by a shadowy black man with twinkling eyes—all set to the love songs of legendary Italian filmmaker Dino Donaggio (Don’t Look Now, Dress to Kill).
Thatcher plays Elle, an actress whose father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), recently married Elle’s friend Dominique (Liu). The two, along with a wide-eyed waif named Hunter (Froseth), are making a film based on a sci-fi comic book series called Candy Floss. The three live in an empty luxury hotel in a mysterious pink and blue fog-shrouded city. And lurking outside is a fearsome killer named The Leather Man, looking for his missing daughter, finding instead helpless women to tear apart with his black diamond-encrusted hands. “A fairy tale?” pondered one of the girls. “Beast? God?”
“I started my career trying to capture authenticity,” said Refn, who first gained recognition for his gritty. The pusher trilogy, featuring a young Mads Mikkelsen as a low-life criminal roaming the mean streets of Copenhagen. “And I realized after three films that I can’t do that, because it doesn’t work. It’s not the same. So I became interested in things that are not real.”
And after the growth of dreamlike projects that include films like this one Bronson again Only God Forgives and TV series like Too Old to Die Young and a magician Copenhagen CowboyRefn (who himself changed his moniker to NWR in his film credits) seems to have lost faith in the dark fairy tale. “It’s actually about human behavior, but it’s set in a world of magic and fantasy where anything is possible,” he said. “And now it includes beauty and fashion and idols and beauty and evil and desire and sex and pain.”
The actors were more than ready to sink into Refn’s imprisoned vision, especially Thatcher. “It was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life,” said the Yellowjackets star. “He opened me up in a way I never imagined. It was stylish, it was very different, it was still.”
Liu agreed. “Nothing is clear; everything is a poem,” he added. “Every answer you want, you get a question. It keeps you in a limited creative space. I’ve never been challenged like that before.”
Melton, who Refn found when his daughter watched him Riverdale he too, was beaten just like that. “He is one of the best actors in cinema,” he said.
Refn admitted that he is more interested in rethinking the nature of narrative to more accurately reflect how people experience information in an algorithm-inflected, dopamine-driven, scrolling-screen society. Goodbye traditional storytelling, hello emotion-driven understatement—an approach that really had its fans in the press conference. “Thank you for the amazing and professional painting,” said one Russian journalist. “Most of us experienced a visible orgasm yesterday.”
Refn’s biggest challenge these days is making sure he’s not rigid about his filmmaking process. “To me, hell is when I know what’s going to happen,” he said. “So I don’t know how to do it. I’m only interested in not knowing. Creativity is like a fluid. Go with that. Life is in the creative place. When you work together, you live, that’s when you live. Not knowing is very happy, and knowing is not very happy.”
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