The Danish Cannes-nection – a one-man power named Nicolas Winding Refn

Just a few days ago, mid-May, Nicolas Winding Refn stood in front of a select preview audience in a little backstreet multiplex in the south of France.

“This cinema room is the very first one in Cannes where I ever showed a film, exactly 30 years ago….”

“…and nobody bought it.”

Pusher, depicting a bad week in the life of Copenhagen drug dealer Frank, looked like nothing in Danish cinema before, but certainly after, as it was part of defining the still prosperous Nordic Noir brand. It also brought the new screen faces of Kim Bodnia, Zlatko Buric and Mads Mikkelsen on to various degrees of stardom. It preceded the Dogme 95 movement with its raw, handheld under-the-skin visuals. It spawned two sequels and two UK remakes, one of them in Hindi.

In May 1996, fresh from the editing table, the film was shown in Cannes, not at a grand gala cinema, like that year’s big Danish sensation, Breaking the Waves by Lars von Trier, but at worn-down Olympia, used for market screenings.

Olympia is thus the venue that Nicolas Winding Refn, or just “NWR” – another piece of branding, very consciously as that – has chosen for the very first screening of Her Private Hell, his fourth consecutive Cannes entry. Yes, the festival woke up to his talents, a good 15 years after Pusher.

“We’ve cultivated a relationship that’s been very good to me. But nothing is for certain, so you will always have to do your best,” he says of the festival.

Drive appeared here in 2011, went straight to the gala and also won him the Best Director prize at the grand awards night (“beating” none other than von Trier, also competing that year). Only God Forgives followed in 2013, and then Neon Demon in 2016, again in official competition. An Amazon series, Too Old to Die Young (2019), and Copenhagen Cowboy (2023) for Netflix, were both kept out of Cannes, as the festival’s demands of an exclusive screening window are not met by the streaming services. With Her Private Hell, he returns to the gala screen, this time out of competition, but happy to be back at what may be his favourite spot in the entire world.

“There’s not a second of doubt about it. For a film creator, Cannes is The Place that represents cinematic purity.”

Her Private Hell – a title he got from a 1960s paperback with an alluring cover showing a woman facing herself in a mirror – is as “pure” as they come. And although no director credit turns up on the screen until the end of the film, the fairly well-travelled cinema viewer will quite instantly identify the maker behind the images, depicting obscurely mythological and enigmatic locations in distinctly artificial colours, enhanced via neon or fluorescent visuals. Scheming in the forefront are equally enigmatic characters, glamorous, life-weary, outer-worldly as something from Lynch, Kubrick, Frank Miller, manga, opera and a Grimm brother or two, and occasionally violent. The soundtrack is saturated with thick sounds recalling the classic Italian Giallo thriller, like a hi-tech Hitchcock.

The opening end credit reads “byNWR”.

“I’ve used it now for ten years – a little like a bottle of good perfume. I’ve always been interested in creating my own brand of creativity.”

Since the last 15 years, he is arguably “The Danish Connection” in Cannes, as Lars von Trier works increasingly sparingly and Thomas Vinterberg suffered the exceptionally bad timing of having his subsequently Oscar-winning Another Round (Druk, 2020) finished exactly as the Covid pandemic thwarted the full 2020 festival edition.

Of further note is the fact that not a single Danish word has been uttered in his entire Cannes output, shot in Los Angeles, Pasadena, and Bangkok. Rumours of Her Private Hell being filmed in Tokyo did prove wrong, and the film was indeed shot on built sets in Copenhagen, indeed at times looking a bit like Tokyo, at least the NWR version. The same went for Copenhagen in Copenhagen Cowboy, where all but nothing of Copenhagen was visible, with hardly a cowboy in sight. He liked the two words together, and they triggered some nice images. So that was that.

A “proper” Danish film from your hand hasn’t been seen since 2005 and Pusher III. Is that chapter over for you?

“It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s rather that I’m attracted to some things that financially benefits from the English language. So it’s an economical situation more than anything else.”

How up to date are you with the Nordic film scene these days?

“It’s not where my interest goes, insofar as I seek out stuff that’s far from me rather than close. Like computer games, something I’m not that familiar with, but one of my best friends creates them. I find it super fascinating to try to grasp that world and its directions. And AI.”

Pusher made you a central part of “The New Danish Wave” that shook parts of the world, including Cannes in the late 1990s. But were you ever part of a Danish milieu, as many of these filmmakers knew each other, read each other’s scripts and so forth?

“I wasn’t, no. I didn’t go to film school. I’ve always been a Power of One.”

Not that you necessarily have any enemies in the Danish film industry, but did you gain any friends there?

“Not really, because I was never invited into that world. I remember the first ambitiously scheduled film meet on the new Danish cinema, held at the Göteborg Film Festival. I had just made Pusher, and Lars had made Breaking the Waves, and the whole generation of current film Danes were there. I showed Pusher at the festival, but wasn’t invited to the event. Which is OK, I guess. I never had any Danish mentor either.

Could you see yourself being one instead, perhaps? Taking on a few young film Danes and helping them set out for the future?

“I’m absolutely available, but no one has asked me so far. But if anyone visits my byNWR website https://bynwr.com/ and goes to ”contact”, I’ll see what I can do.”

In the meantime, his next project has just been divulged to the world. Maniac Cop is a remake of a 1988 cult classic, with shooting set to start early 2027. Whether a Cannes premiere could be in the works is too early to tell, but one or two things seem fairly certain: No one will speak Danish, and it will be pure “byNWR”. Like a good perfume.

More on Refn:
Wendy Mitchell’s Nordic Film Talks, from May 18, with Nicolas Winding Refn (and Marie Ulven): CLICK HERE or see below.