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Drive

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : A Hollywood stuntman (Ryan Gosling) who moonlights as a getaway driver for thieves finds that a price has been put on his head after a failed robbery.

Opens today September 16, 2011

Runtime:1 hr. 40 min.

 

Q&A with Director Nicolas Winding Refn

(Q) : So you all looked at that trailer and you can see that it's all about driving. This guy, you don't drive at all, right? You don't even have a driver's license.
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : I failed eight times. And the only reason why I passed the original exam was I could memorize it.
 
(Q) : So why should we trust you to know about driving? Who's driving you around all the time?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : I don't live in Los Angeles. I'm from Copenhagen, I live in Copenhagen, so Ryan would basically be my chauffeur in Los Angeles and drive me all around LA and show me LA.
 
(Q) : Nice chauffeuring. Well let's start in the obvious way, which is not the way your movie is in any way, but with how it came about. How do you suddenly leave Copenhagen and go to Hollywood and make a movie about driving?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : It all started with Harrison Ford.
 
(Q) : Everything does, doesn't it?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : Yes it does. I was in Los Angeles working on a movie with Harrison Ford called "They Dying of the Light," which is a script by Paul Schrader, and it's about a CIA agent who goes on an existentialistic journey and dies at the end, and I really wanted to kill Harrison ford.
 
(Q) : And that was the whole motivation for you doing it.
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : The whole motivation was that if I could kill Harrison Ford in a movie I would have achieved something. So I was in LA and I'd gotten all the money to make the movie, I was working on the script with Harrison and then Harrison decided he didn't want to die, and I was like damn, there goes the whole point of the movie. So I was really angry with myself of being in Hollywood, bought into the whole glamour of coming to Hollywood, and of course ending up in development hell.

And then out of the blue I got a phone call from Ryan Gosling asking if I would meet with him about doing a movie together. And I was like yeah, sure, why not? LA is all about meetings. The only problem was that I had a very high fever because I had come into Los Angeles ill on the plane. But Harrison Ford had gotten me these anti-flu drugs you have in America which are very strong. It got the flu down but it made me high as a kite.
 
(Q) : Wait a minute; you walk away from Harrison's movie and he still gets you anti-flu drugs?

(Nicholas Winding Refn) : And high as a kite. I was speaking equally as slow as Harrison Ford. So I went to the dinner with Ryan, which was kind of weird because he had sent a script over in the morning that I had read but I couldn't remember it because I was so high, and when I got to the restaurant I literally was the chair. So it's hard to have a conversation with somebody who thinks he's a chair, so we didn't really talk about anything except a little bit of music, a little bit about my movies. But I was not able to basically communicate, and I couldn't look at him.

He would be sitting where you are and I'm sitting like this, and I couldn't move so he'd be talking to me in profile. It was just disastrous. Like a blind date, like this was no action tonight. I asked him halfway through dinner "Would you please take me home?" And he goes "Why, you can't drive?" And I go "No, I don't have a driver's license." So we get into his car and we drive to my hotel in Santa Monica, and on the way, you know that awkward silence on the blind date, you know that kind of eeriness, Ryan tries to break that by turning on the radio, and it's soft rock.

So here we are driving to Santa Monica and REO Speedwagon's "I Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore" starts to play. You know when you're really stoned you do stupid stuff? Like turn the music really loud, like really obnoxiously loud? And the sound blasts through the stereo and I start singing to the song, which I never do, and it's really embarrassing when you do that. So I'm in the car, I'm with Ryan, I'm singing "I Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore," and then I start to cry. Tears are rolling down my cheeks.
 
(Q) : How is Ryan reacting to all of this?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : He's petrified. He's not even looking at me. He's like looking straight ahead this time thinking "Oh my god; what's he going to do, kill me next?" And I was missing my wife and my second daughter had just been born, what was I doing in Los Angeles? Harrison Ford won't die; it's a disaster.

But it gives me some kind of thought, like some kind of movie evokes in my head, and I turn to Ryan for the first time and I scream at his face, like really loud because the music is so loud, and I say "I got it! We're going to make a movie about a man who drives around in a car at night listening to pop music because that's emotional relief!" Ryan looks at me and he goes "Cool. I'm in." And then that's how the movie got started.
 
(Q) : But the music that we're hearing, that beat that was there, talk a little about that. You guys haven't had a chance to see the movie yet, but you'll go on Friday or you'll be punched. But what's in your head musically? There's no REO Speedwagon in that, but there's this continuous kind of beat and it's electropop.
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : Whenever I make a movie I try to imagine it as a piece of music because I don't do drugs anymore, except for that time with Harrison, so music gives me ideas because essentially I'm a fetish filmmaker; I make films based on what I would like to see. And I always wanted an electronic score for a movie like this because I thought it would be interesting to counterbalance the masculinity of the American car world and the stunt world with the feminine pop of early '80s in Europe, and that would kind of make a counterbalance.

And when you combine those two things, because I stripped away all dialog, some kind of energies and emotions would be blown out of it. And then I would listen to a lot of Kraftwerk in the beginning when I was writing it with Hoss, and developing and shooting I would continue to use Kraftwerk and then Brian Eno and stuff like that. And then when it got into the actual final editing I would find three pop songs that I would then use as a reference that I then got the license to put into the movie, and then I had Cliff Martinez emulate that sound for the soundtrack.
 
(Q) : So when you're putting that together what else is in your head? Is your head filled with movies of the 1980s that were set in LA? Michael Mann movies like "Thief"?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : I actually didn't see "Thief" until after we wrapped shooting, but I loved it, it's a great movie. I should have seen it before, probably. There was not so much of a film reference, there was more of a literature reference to Grimm's fairy tales and the idea of doing a fairy tale in Los Angeles was very interesting to me because being an outsider you only really see Hollywood as a city of illusions, and that's pure fantasy, and doing a movie like a Grimm's fairy tale, which starts with very champaign emotional purity but ends with extreme violence really suits my taste.
 
(Q) : So that's the fairy tale to you. I think most people that do live in Los Angeles also see it as an illusion. They might work there but it's a whole different thing that's happening. You described how you and Ryan meet and have this meeting that in a lot of cases could have ended with him dropping you off and saying to his manager "What the hell was that about? What is that guy about?" But what was it that you saw in him that you wanted to put into "Drive"?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : Clearly he is the best actor around, so I could tell that right away. I hadn't seen a lot of his movies but I knew from what I'd seen he was the best, and when I saw him for real he was like magnetic. As an actor he was so unique in his power that it would work. And because we had to share our experience within the car one way or another it just felt natural the way it evolved for us, and we almost became telekinetic, like two bodies but one mind.
 
(Q) : Yet you give him in this movie very little to say. So this is the cold loner character that we don't know anything. Nobody here knows, but he's also working as a stuntman, a driver in Hollywood, as well as doing jobs on the side as a getaway driver. I love that idea that he gets "You have five minutes. This is it and you have to do this." Where is all that coming from that you wanted to combine not only Los Angeles as a dreamscape, but the idea of this criminal?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : The book it's based on by James Sallis is a really good book and I highly recommend it. And in the book the driver character is different because there's a whole backstory to him that it kind of explains his behavior and so forth. But I wanted the movie to be about a man who has a mythological past, so he becomes more of a mythological hero out of the cinema mythology. He's almost like a conjured up imagination; he is what the other characters need him to be.

And then why he becomes silent is because he doesn't have anything to say unless you ask him. He will only answer your question if he wants to answer it, but that makes him automatically more mysterious, and he's also romantic at the same time it makes him also scarier and violent when he finally becomes violent. It's basically how all mythological heroes are usually created in the same kind of DNA in every country in every civilization.

(Q) : And violence is always at the other end of it.
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : It's inevitable that things will end with violence because that is what heroes do at the end. They always have to protect the innocent from the final consequence, and that always involves violence because that's the emotional relief.
 
(Q) : Is that you? Did you grow up wanting to punch people out?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : Maybe. I couldn't do it, so I make movies about it. I mean there's a lot of me in all the films I make, because when you're a fetish you automatically project who you want to me or what would you like to do. There's sexual fetish, there are other kinds of fetishes that represent essentially who you are underneath. And I've made a couple of other movies about transformation, because this movie is about a man who transforms himself into a superhero through the story, and I've always been very obsessed about transformation. There was a French critic that called this the trilogy of transformation for me.
 
(Q) : There's the "Pusher" trilogy as well, which you did. But the one I want to bring up is "Bronson," because "Bronson" is based on this guy that's still in prison in Britain, who just has this rage that's in him. I read a quote from you where you said that's the most autobiographical of your films. How is that?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : I didn't have an interest in Bronson because he's never achieved anything of value, or Michael Peterson, which was his real name. But I was interested in a transformation of how he transforms himself from Michael Peterson into Charlie Bronson, how one transforms himself into the alter ego but essentially gets trapped in that.

And that was what fascinated me, and of course I used a lot of my own life into that because we all deal with our demons in one way or another, and I'm able to do it through my films. The film I did afterwards, called "Valhalla Rising," which is about a man who starts in a cage and escapes and goes through man's evolution and ends up being man, and then "Drive" that starts with a man who becomes a superhero. So there is that kind of fascination for me. And it's great drama.
 
(Q) : I'm about to ask you about Albert Brooks in this movie, which I think is a performance like nobody has ever seen him give. I saw him this morning and asked him if he really was a criminal at some point in his life, because you told him when you met him that he was somebody who's capable of killing someone. What is this that you saw in Albert Brooks that he should play this?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : I always wanted Albert Brooks but I'd never met him, and I didn't really know anything about him but I had a concept that he would be interesting. And plus never having played a bad guy or killed anybody was automatically interesting to me. But he was able to come and meet me at my house in Los Angeles, and he was a volcano of emotions. He was all over the place emotionally, which was really interesting because you could see the range as an actor first of all, but also it taught me a lot about how to use him very quickly. Because I gave him the part right away realizing that this guy essentially would kill somebody so we should do it in a movie before he does it for real.
 
(Q) : He talks about the idea that it is much more interesting to cast someone like him than it would be to cast an actor you immediately would expect to kill somebody.
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : Absolutely. It's always interesting for an audience to be surprised. They may have presumptions of what it's going to be like, but surprising them is what we all want to be. We all want to go to the movies and see something we didn't expect. At the same time we don't want to be alienated either. So it's always a fine balance. But I knew that having him being who he is playing it as Albert really is, and then when he becomes violent he becomes extremely violent was always very interesting to me. It's a bit like playing the piano.
 
(Q) : Does the piano also become violent?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : No, but you can be violent with the piano.
 
(Q) : This is the guy that his most successful movie is "Finding Nemo," where he does the voice of a very friendly daddy fish. And when we see him he's in these angst ridden kinds of roles where he just doesn't really get the girl. He's in "Broadcast News" and he's sweating and anxious, and here he's as cool as he could possibly be. Was this hard? Was this a difficult thing between the two of you to get with?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : No, it was actually very easy, and also because I made him a movie producer in the film that used to be a gangster. In Sallis' book the Bernie Rose character is more the conventional mobster, which is really good in the book, but the movie needed to be something else and I came up with this idea that he used to be a gangster then he became a movie producer and now is an entrepreneur, that's how he sees himself. And because of his association with the driver he has to go back to being a gangster again.
 
(Q) : Yeah he seems to really be as a character kind of upset that he has to resort to violence, because he's looking forward to seeing this. He wanted to see his name on a car too. I don't want to give too much away, except when I asked him this morning to give me a secret about you he said "You ask Nicolas for me about how on one day he came on the set to direct wearing a dress."
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : I wasn't wearing a dress, but what I do is I wear a blanket around my stomach whenever I work every day because it keeps me warm and it keeps me calm, because making films is very stressful. And I only take it off if I'm either very warm or very, very angry, and nobody can know the difference. So it's part of my way of making film, and if I don't have the blanket I get completely paranoid, so the blanket is always with me.
 
(Q) : Which he sees as the dress. Well in a way it is, and it's fetish, so it's pretty great. There's another aspect, another theme and plot that's running through this movie that involves Carrie Mulligan. Can you set that up a little?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : I was originally looking for a Latina actress to play the role of Irene, because in the book Irene is Latina.
 
(Q) : You thought immediately, you saw "An Education," and you thought "Carrie Mulligan; she's it."
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : I was meeting the best talent in Hollywood of Latina backgrounds, incredible actresses, and for some reason I just couldn't get it to work in my mind, and I don’t why. And I'll probably never know why because it was all in front of me, it was handed to me. And I got a call from Carrie's agent asking if I would meet with her because she had seen my films and would like to meet, again Hollywood's all about meeting. So I said sure. I didn't have anything for her in the movie, but if she wants to come by my house she was more that welcome.

So she came at nine o'clock in the morning, and the minute she walked through the door I knew it was going to be her. So I said "You're it," and that changed everything. I think that it was her innocence that reminded me of my own wife, and knowing that I had to go through very violent emotions in making the film I needed to know that I could fall in love with her. And she reminded me very much of my own wife and that made it work for me. And then of course two days later Carrie moved into my house with my wife, so we became very close.
 
(Q) : Do you want to explain that?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : She didn't have a place to live.
 
(Q) : She had no place to live? Academy Award nominee for "An Education," but no place to live.
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : Which I had never seen. I had never seen any of her movies when I met her, but my wife had said she as very good, and my mother had said she was very good. If they like it then I know I will like it.
 
(Q) : For any actors out there this is the greatest story that they could ever possibly here. Who cares what you did before? The meeting worked, and it's even better if somebody's on Harrison Ford's anti-virus medication. Alright let's run that clip with Carrie Mulligan.

It goes right back to this sense that it's going to explode that emotion into something extremely violent. Do people come to you and say "Nick, you did the 'Pusher' trilogy, 'Bronson,' 'Valhalla Rising,' and now you've done your Hollywood movie. Could you ease up on this? Do we always have to have violence?" Do they say that to you?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : My wife asks me each time when I'm going to make the romantic comedy, and I say to her "I'm trying, I'm trying." I think art is an act of violence. I mean art is a combination of sex and violence of course, and I'm still in the violent area, but I would love to make something about sex. My only problem is that I had sex scenes, so I'm trying to figure out how to solve this problem.
 
(Q) : There's all that sexual tension in this movie because it's not acted on. There's just them looking at each other. There's a lot of that look, and that is I think a very difficult thing to achieve, whether it's being done on that set or done in the editing room so it is exactly the rhythm you want it to be. But how do you behave to your actors when you're pleased with what they've done?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : I would cry a lot.
 
(Q) : So they know that's a good thing?

(Nicholas Winding Refn) : Well yeah, because then I knew they fell in love, and when you work with actors that are great, like I had, you take away the dialog with Carrie and Ryan, they have to use their gestures and their physical behavior to tell everything. Most actors use their voices to communicate and they're used to that, but when you take that away you basically handicap them and they're forced to exercise a muscle which for a long time maybe hasn't really been greased because everybody always relies on the words.

t was interesting to go through that because I would shoot very little coverage, like almost zero coverage, but I would do the take again and again and again and again and again, so almost stripped down any kind of barrier to its essential. And I would just always go over and hug either Carrie or Ryan for doing a scene until they gave into the hug, which could take a long time, and then we would do it again and again and again, and then when I cried I said "Now I'm in love. We can move on."
 
(Q) : It's almost sexual harassment as a directing style. It's unique; I really think that's good. Nobody's complained so far, so it's okay. So what is the other side of that when you're not happy? Do you laugh uproariously? What happens when you're looking at what they're doing as not working?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : We continue until it does, and maybe that means changing something, rewriting stuff. I mean I don't storyboard, I don't do anything beforehand. I show up and then I figure out what I want to do when I'm there. I let the actors block it out what makes them feel comfortable, and when it works for everybody then I photograph it the way I would like to see it.

But it's always changing, and if something is not working in a scene I stop and then we usually end up changing the whole scene because you can't just change something without it having a domino effect. So you have to trust yourself and your instincts, because filmmaking is about being unsafe, it's being on dangerous ground, because that makes you creative. The chief enemy of any kind of art form is safe.
 
(Q) : In light of all that are there certain films in your history that you think of as the epitome of the dangerous film and that have sort of helped define the idea of films that have that sense of danger to them?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : The film that showed me that film was an art form was "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." I saw that when I was 14 in New York Cinema Village and that's when I realized that I want to do what that film has done to me.
 
(Q) : You mentioned about wanting to do a movie of a sexual nature but you didn't like sex scenes. A good example of that is Mike Nichols' film "Closer." That whole movie is all about sex and there's not one sex scene in it. The question I think I would have is about the rehearsal process maybe that you had with the actors.
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : I don't rehearse but I shoot in chronological order, which gives the actors a normal evolution of how they see their characters but also makes them unpredictable because I can change things along the way if I want to. But I would always meet with the actors beforehand and then I would talk about why they're not doing what they're supposed to. Say for example you walk through a door, I ask well what happens if you didn't walk through a door? So whatever is left is the right thing to do. It's kind of the opposite analysis of trying to figure out what's right rather than thinking about what isn't right.

(Q) : Since Ryan was attached to it was it easy to get financing?
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : Absolutely. It's all about the combination, but certainly having a star helps, and a star like Ryan Gosling automatically puts it on its map. But all the studios passed on it, nobody would finance it, so I had to go into the world of independent financing, which again I was used to because that's where I come from, and we had to start preselling the movie at Cannes just to get things rolling. And then we were able to get a California tax incentive for it and then close the budget, which meant we only had seven weeks to shoot the movie, which is tough for a movie with a lot of action. But of course yes, having a movie star as your alter ego certainly helps with the financing, absolutely.

(Q) : You were telling me before that you're working with Ryan again two more times.
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : Yeah well it went so well the first time we thought why not continue?
 
(Q) : So he's going to pick you up in a car and drive you somewhere.
 
(Nicholas Winding Refn) : This time on a plane. We're doing a movie in Bangkok at Christmas called "Only God Forgives," and then afterwards we're doing the remake of a sci-fi movie called "Logan's Run."
 
(Q): The Ryan Gosling trilogy; this is that. You're just thinking in trilogies. For all of us we hope you just keep driving, whether it's with Ryan or with anybody, because this is one hell of a really terrific movie.

 

End.