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NICOLAS WINDING REFN DOC HITS YOUTUBE
Last week on the blog, I linked to a great piece by Nicolas Winding Refn on the obscure exploitation director Andy Milligan. Now, though, it’s the Drive helmer himself who’s in the spotlight, as he’s the subject of an hour-long portrait by French documentarian Laurent Duroche, NWR, which is available to watch on YouTube.
As you’ll discover from the very first minute — when we first see and then hear Alejandro Jodorowsky talking French in his distinctive Chilean tones — this is a film without subtitles. But the good news is that Refn is fluent in English and the majority of the people featured in the film — which is centered on the production of Refn’s reteaming with Ryan Gosling, Only God Forgives — are English speakers too.
The movie is embedded below, and here’s blogger Edwin Adrian Nieves on NWR:
Refn tells us when he saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a 14 year old, it became his favorite film, one he believes to be the greatest of all. Why? Because “film did not have to be normal, it could be more like a piece of music, like John Cage music, it could be just a specific shot of images, it could be so many things…That film is so much imprinted in my memory.” What follows after those words is a glimpse into a short film called Pusher, which, when considering its feature film successors, is such a treat. We then learn that at the time when Refn garnered a budget to make the feature Pusher, he was accepted to the prestigious Danish Film Institute, putting him at a crossroads. He decided that instead of paying school tuition, he could use that money to make his film…a great example of a filmmaker, an artist, with enough guts to follow his own path.
