Nicolas Winding Refn
Drive made silence, synths and sudden violence into a global style. Refn composes in neon and holds his shots until beauty and brutality become indistinguishable. The style is the substance, deliberately.
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Drive
Driver is a skilled Hollywood stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals. Though he projects an icy exterior, lately he's been warming up to a pretty neighbor named Irene and her young son, Benicio.
Defining films
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Both conjure dreamlogic from darkness, the surreal emerging from the mundane, color and sound weaponized to unsettle.
Fellow Danish architects of contemporary Nordic cinema, both working in the shadow of Dogme 95's legacy, each finding their own path toward transcendence.
Both elevate visual excess into philosophy, neon-soaked frames where style is substance, and beauty is inseparable from loneliness.
Shared obsession with masculine trauma and spiritual emptiness, the criminal or fallen man as protagonist, shot with a formalist's precision.
In their own words
I grew up on Italian horror films, and Lucio Fulci was a very big part of that. The way he constructed images, the atmosphere in films like The Beyond and Zombi 2, left a huge impression on me.
He wants to make a film that, like Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, is 'pure atmosphere,' without much dialogue.
Suspiria is a truly beautiful film with extraordinary visual language. It's definitely something that's always been in the back of my mind when I'm creating a mood or atmosphere with color.
He was like an abstract painter with a camera. When I started shooting my movies, I felt he liberated me because he didn't care about logic.
