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Valhalla Rising

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Director Nicolas Winding Refn

Story : A mute warrior with supernatural strength escapes his captors and sails to an unknown land with a ship full of Vikings.

 

(Q) : How did you decide to shoot this in English?

(Nicolas Winding Refn) : I think that the kind of films I make, making them in English is so much better for the commercial potential. Genre films in English are just much more accessible in terms of distribution for a wider audience. So it’s kind of a commercial decision but also, growing up in New York and English being such a part of my upbringing, it’s like a natural evolution also. And also financing, there are more financing possibilities if you do it in English because it just automatically becomes international.
 
(Q): What was the fascination about casting Mads Mikkelsen again for this one?
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): I always say he’s really good at playing mean..
 
(Q): Character-wise?
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): Just mean as person; he’s good at interpreting mean character because I am so much in all my films. But then, for himself, I think he’s an incredible actor. He’s one of the few actors that has this gift of not having to speak to act because his face is just so hypnotic for cinema. And his aging has really helped him; not he’s at the peak of his career I think.
 
(Q): You put in characters that are mute and at the same time he has only one eye.
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): It was very challenging for Mads, also because he was the one-eyed character was written as an entity, he’s not a human being. So we also had to be very careful of his behavior not being too human, because he was like a monolith in captivity in the beginning; an enigma. So I think it would for Mads it would be like the ultimate peak of a creative relationship and challenge.
 
(Q) : I heard that you hired a historian to correct the story? What did you actually talk about?
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): It wasn’t so much I hired him as I hired a co-director that was a historian and a novelist as well, so he was a very good writer and he was an expert of war. I think Roy Jacobsen, his contribution is incredible. We wrote the film together and came to sign it together. But his whole knowledge made it much more kind of authentic.

It was his suggestion that they would become Christian Vikings; I never knew there were Christian Vikings. I always had this clichéd image of a Viking as this kind of Northern Pagan, but he said no for about a hundred years or so there were Christian Vikings after Christ’s coming to the North that would travel to the Holy Land to fight the wars. So in that way he opened up a lot more interesting possibilities for how to tell the story.
 
(Q) : Could you talk about the challenge of shooting?
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): Physically it was just the most demanding, demanding shoot ever; it was so fucking hard. Because I was obsessive about going to these places that were so remote and so out of nowhere that sometimes it would take two hours just to get there and two hours going back, so four hours just traveling. It became like how far could I go really. It was almost my own search for the heavens.
 
(Q): Was there any travel on the location? Something about foggy.
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): I was very fortunate that Scotland is very diverse in its surroundings. We would have fog appearing, and I would shoot in chronological order, so I would take what I had and just shoot with it. But it had this incredible fog that would just come down from the mountains. Visually it was very interesting. The whole movie was shot in Scotland.
 
(Q): Did you guys use any particular lens to avoid any fog?
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): No. I didn’t have the luxury; I just had to go and shoot, whatever the conditions were, and make it work for me. But I think the harshness added to the movie; it made it grittier.
 
(Q): What was fascinating about the Vikings? Have you always liked them like since being a teenager?
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): No, I’ve never been a Viking fan; I don’t really have an interest in Viking culture. I think it’s the challenge itself of making a Viking film, and kind of like what it must have been for them to travel to America must be the equivalent for us traveling to outer space, it was such a far out concept. So I think that really fascinated me.
 
(Q): This is like a nature vs man kind of concept there. Did you have those concepts when you started?

 (Nicolas Winding Refn): I think a lot of the film was really shaped into place like two months before we started shooting. Once I got to Glasgow and really began to finish the script it was very much those places and locations and themes that really began to become very apparent in the movie. So it was a constant evolution.
 
(Q): The process was really interesting. Talk about casting the boy, Maarten Stevenson.
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): He is the son of the priest in the film, Gary Lewis. In England, especially in Scotland, they have very difficult child labor laws; you can almost not work with them because “Harry Potter” had been there and had taken such advantage of the kids that the government had been very strict on laws.

Time-wise and what they can and cannot do and stuff like that. And then with Gary Lewis, having his son and he also being in the film, they were at least a little more flexible. But I saw him at a casting session and he just became the one automatically.
 
(Q) : he’s basically One Eye's partner.
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): Yeah they become one person at the end of the movie.
 
(Q): That would be able to speak his mind. There’s a lot of focus on this kid. Does he have previous work?
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): No, and he has no interest in acting, he doesn’t want to be an actor or anything. Maybe that was the good part also; he was very natural, very full of instinct.
 
(Q): Yeah, I sensed that really. Could you talk about the choice of the color correction? Was that a conscious choice, almost like what hell looks like?
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): Yeah, and almost to give the film an unrealistic sensibility to it, make the film more like it takes place between heaven and hell; it’s like a superficial reality. And because it was shot all outdoors in exteriors that were obviously real it was able to play off itself.
 
(Q): In the film, you can feel that sense of hell. How did you make it almost like a Jesus Christ ending?
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): Because One Eye’s journey had to end somewhere, and I felt that it’s not that One Eye realized anything but it’s that he naturally evolves into man. He starts as a slave on top of a mountain, he’s like an animal, and then he goes to become a warrior and can use his tools and he’s free, he’s a free man. And then he becomes god because the other Vikings begin to perceive his behavior and see him as god because he’s bringing them where they belong. And then in the film he becomes man by sacrificing himself. The film has four sections really.
 
(Q): Do you have some sort of a message about religion in a certain way?
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): No, no. I didn’t set out to make a political film in any way. I think faith is about interpretation, and sure there is the fanatic who certainly destroys everything around him in his quest for conquering, but I also believe the priest, who’s a pacifist who is not able to stand strong. So the film doesn’t have any kind of political message or any kind of political meanings, it’s very much about interpretation, which religion really is in a way.
 
(Q): There’s an element of Andrei Tarkovsky and ties with nature. Was there any influence?
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): Oh yeah, there’s a lot of "Stalker" in the movie, there’s a lot of “2001,” there are a lot of spaghetti westerns. It’s almost like a catharsis of the films we were watching.
 
(Q): Were you inspired by any other stories? I heard you were inspired by your mother.
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): No, that comes from when somebody asked me why I was so interested in the unknown, why I was always making films that are very much up for interpretation and open endings and stuff. I think it comes to that when I was little my mother once read to me a science-fiction novel, and I was like five years old or something. The story was about a father and son team that travels to the moon, and in the moon they find a coffin, a human coffin.

And I can’t remember why the coffin was there or what was in it, or maybe my mother never finished the novel, I can’t remember. But I’ve been obsessed with what is beyond anything; I guess that’s why I’m always interested in the openness of an explanation. Like the quest never stopping, you’re on a constant journey.
 
(Q): Are you working on “Only God Forgives”?
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): I’m shooting it right after Christmas because I’ve decided to do a movie with Ryan Gosling right now called “Drive,” in Los Angeles.
 
(Q): So you’ll shoot “Drive” and the next one is “Only God Forgives.”
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): And I’ll have to do them back to back, like overlapping.
 
(Q): What’s “Drive”?
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): It’s based on a novel called “Drive,” by James Sallis, and it’s about a stuntman by day and getaway driver by night.
 
(Q): Right, I read that actually. It’s really interesting. There’s a rumor going around that you might do “Wonder Woman.” Is that true?
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): Well I’ve said that I really wanted to make “Wonder Woman.” You never know.
 
(Q): I even read this morning that Jennifer Love Hewitt was interested in making “Wonder Woman.” She actually contacted Warner executives.
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): I think a lot of people want to be part of that, but it’s a very difficult, challenging concept.
 
(Q): Would you be willing to direct it if they come to you?
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): Sure, if they come to me with the right approach. I mean I think they’ve been working on it for many, many years trying to come up with a concept.
 
(Q): Yeah, I think so. They originally offered it to Joss Whedon. He dropped out on that.
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): Why?
 
(Q): I have no idea, but that’s what happened. So I don’t know who’s going to be directing it. That would be interesting if you were going to do that. Definitely an interesting angle.
 
 (Nicolas Winding Refn): It would need that I think. It would need an interesting kind of approach to it.

End.