There is no compromise when it comes to the vision of Nicolas Winding Refn. The director has created a body of work that’s distinctly singular, and makes no attempt to reach a pre-conceived audience. Rather, the filmmaker asks audiences to give themselves over to an experience, and they are often rewarded with bold movies presenting stories that you simply won’t find anywhere else. And that’s true of “The Neon Demon,” now in playing in theaters, which stars Elle Fanning as a young ingenue who enters the modeling world and quickly becomes the envy of everyone around her. Suffice to say, there will be blood.
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Recently, our Editor In Chief, Rodrigo Perez, hosted a discussion with Nicolas Winding Refn at the Film Society Of Lincoln Center for their The Close Up podcast, and the talk was both fascinating and wide-ranging. One of the more interesting revelations that can be made is that even though Refn works toward making cinema that has his own hard-to-miss fingerprint, his process is one that’s very open to change. The director shoots chronologically, and when making “The Neon Demon,” even as the production start loomed, Refn was figuring out what his movie was about.
“…there was still not that clarity of what the movie was going to be,” Refn explained. “Obviously [Elle’s]’s going to ask, ‘What’s the film about?’ So I asked her, ‘Do you think you’re beautiful?’ And she was very taken aback. And I said, ‘No, seriously, do you think you’re beautiful?’ And she said yes. And then I was like, ‘Oh my god, that’s the movie’: The birth of narcissism. And eight weeks later we were shooting.”
“Then everything changes from day one. I rewrite very much [from that point on] because when you shoot in chronological order the first few days you try and find the balance of the characters and the performances, but very quickly it starts to alter and you just have to continue with the domino effect,” he added.
As Refn mentions, narcissism is a big key to the film, but it’s one he wanted to explore through the lens of a genre picture.
“I want to make a horror film about beauty, [Elle] could dig that because she wanted to make a movie for her generation about beauty,” he said.
“I wonder what it would be like to be in a world where narcissism is accepted; it’s a virtue or a quality,” he added.“I grew up in a world of narcissism as a taboo. But creativity is all about narcissism and self-indulgence and all the beautiful things that criticize you sometimes. In terms of how I can see the world of beauty, the acceptance of narcissism is almost an evolution of how we define human beings.”
As he has done in the past, Refn put himself out on a ledge for the picture, but it sounds like taking that kind of risk is crucial to his approach.
“I think [fear] is the essence of creativity. It’s beautiful. It’s frightening and it’s terrible to be around other people, but it’s what I love about creativity: that constant freefall,” he said.
Listen to the full talk and be sure to catch “The Neon Demon” on the big screen near you.
