Halfway through Pusher, Nicolas Winding Refn’s first installment in what would ultimately become an epic trilogy, the director faced a predicament. Suddenly, the genre marked by guns and car chases held no interest. He abandoned the beatings and foot chases from the film’s early scenes, and went for a haunting, harrowing character study. “I realized I wasn’t interested in gangsters and crime,” the Danish filmmaker explains of his 1996 film. “I was really interested in the morality of the characters, and their emotional descents into hell.”

That’s from KM Doughton’s feature on Nicholas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy which we’ve just posted to the Filmmaker main page. Check it out. And the films, by the way, open this weekend in New York.