Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn tells a first-class story about a moment that triggered his concept for “Drive,” a fractured fairy tale that conjures a heightened look at Los Angeles lowlifes, with a soundtrack that evokes the ’80s and a love story on the side.
“Ryan had called me and asked if I would do the movie,” Refn recalled during a recent stop in Chicago. “Ryan” would be Ryan Gosling, who stars as a part-time Hollywood stuntman — a loner in a satin jacket — moonlighting as a getaway driver who finds himself backed into corner. The only way out involves a good deal of brain bashing and precision driving.
Refn has cooked up equally visceral and criminal-minded thrills before — in 2009’s “Bronson” and the “Pusher” trilogy to name a few — and he took home the win for best director for “Drive” at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
“So Ryan and I met in a restaurant in LA,” Refn said, ramping up. “I was only there for a few days working on another film called ‘The Dying of the Light,’ a Paul Schrader script. It was really good, about a CIA agent who dies. And I had gotten Harrison Ford in the lead.” But, there was trouble on the project. Ford didn’t want to die, or maybe it was the producers or studio execs who didn’t want to see him bite the dust.
“The story kind of lost its whole purpose and I was like, ‘(Expletive) that!’ I wasted four months of my life on nothing! I bought into the whole Hollywood (expletive) where everything just ends up in development hell.”
This was Refn’s state of mind when he met with Gosling.
“I just had one little problem, which was that I had a very high fever. Coming in on the plane (from his home in Copenhagen) I had gotten very ill, so I was very weak and I said to myself, ‘Well, OK, I’m just going to take a lot of anti-flu drugs while I’m here for the next four days.’ So when I finally came to the dinner with Ryan, I was basically high as a kite. I was literally out of my mind. And I don’t do drugs, so it was a very strange situation for me to be in.”
Halfway through the dinner Refn was so out of it he had to leave, and he asked Gosling to take him home “because I don’t drive a car. And he was like, ‘Excuse me?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I gotta get out of here.’
“So we get out of the restaurant, like a blind date gone wrong — a disastrous blind date! — we’re in the car, going on the freeway, and to break the silence Ryan turns on the radio and it’s a soft rock station and REO Speedwagon’s ‘I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore’ starts to play, and I love rock ballads. And something happens within me that’s impulsive and I start to turn it very loud, like, obnoxiously loud, and I start singing to the song, which itself is pretty annoying in somebody else’s car. I just couldn’t help myself: ‘I can’t fight this feeling anymooooore.'”
This is all happening in a car with an actor he had just met for the first time some 30 minutes earlier.
“Something clicks inside of me and I start to get really emotional. You know, when guys are ill they’re, like, really weak? And you combine that with flu medicine, which makes you high — you’re in a pretty out-of-focus stage, you’re vulnerable. And I start to miss my wife, my kids, I’m frustrated that I can’t kill Harrison Ford — everything is a disaster. And I start to cry.
“Now here I am in the car with Ryan, singing REO Speedwagon, with tears falling down my cheeks. And that moment, that catharsis of listening to pop music and having an emotional release — which I needed because I was so out of it — suddenly prompted me to turn to Ryan for the first time and, like, look at him in this car ride. And I scream in his face, ‘I know what “Drive” is! It’s gonna be about a man who drives around in a car at night listening to pop music because that’s his emotional release.'”
Inspiration is a funny thing.
“Ryan would drive me around at night showing me his LA, you know, seeing much more of Los Angeles than I was used to. And what occurred to me was that LA never left the ’80s. It has very much an ’80s vibe because it looks like architecture from the ’80s. The neon lights are very ’80s. It’s just an ’80s city. And then when you combine that with an electronic score that’s rooted in Euro pop from the late ’70s and early ’80s, combining those elements can throw you back to a certain period because the film is also shot and structured like a fairy tale. It is like a land that may or may not exist.”
“Drive” looks to be the first of a series of collaborations between the actor and director. Gosling is attached to star in Refn’s remake of “Logan’s Run,” as well as an action film called “Only God Forgives,” which Refn said they will begin shooting around Christmas. Set in Bangkok, in an underbelly of gambling, boxing and prostitution, presumably it will be yet another Refn project saturated with violence.
“Not necessarily,” he said coyly.
Twitter @NinaMetzNews
