GreenCine | article

Nicolas Winding Refn made an international splash with his 1996 debut feature Pusher, a grungy thriller set in the tawdry but volatile criminal underworld of drug dealers, petty criminals and prostitutes in Denmark. The jittery style and fascination with the mundane, unglamorous street reality of a drug dealer whose ambition lands him in serious debt to an unforgiving crime boss made the film a big hit in Europe and launched the career of the young director. Eight years later, Refn returned to the wellspring for a pair sequels, each following a supporting character from the original film as they wade through the same social cesspool years later.

The return was not completely by choice. In the interim, he had put not only passion but also his own finances on the line for his independently produced American debut Fear X. The haunting drama of an emotionally numb security guard (played with suppressed desperation by John Turturro) obsessively studying surveillance tapes to find some reason for his wife's random murder was critically hailed but abandoned by its distributor when it failed to find an audience. It wound up arriving straight to video in most cities. Refn returned to Denmark deeply in debt and in need of a commercial success and the Pusher sequels were born. (Phie Ambo's documentary Gambler tells the entire story in great detail.)

Refn was honored as an "Emerging Master" at the 2006 Seattle International Film Festival. The three Pusher films had just been picked up by Magnolia for American distribution and Refn was in an easy-going mood when we met one Sunday in May to discuss the Pusher trilogy and Fear X, the labor of love that put him in debt and unfairly remains in the shadow of his more popular gangster-grunge thrillers.

Gambler

Unlike a lot of directors of your generation, you didn't go to film school. You studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Columbia. Was it your intention to become an actor originally?

Yeah. When I was younger, I wanted to do special effects. Originally, I wanted to design toys and I was very into special effects and science fiction. But I wanted to become an actor and went to acting school and realized how much I hated it. But I think it just really came out of a problem with authority. That's why I control my own films.

But it led me to directing. I don't really see myself as a director. That's like a title. It's more like I make films and I just want to control it. I'm colorblind so I can't really paint. I don't work with clay. I'm very disabled, so I don't have a lot of options in terms of artistic expressions.

Had you made any short films or anything before you made Pusher?

I'm from that generation that grew up with a video camera and the video mentality. Of course, even now, it's like everyday knowledge, but in the early 90s it was the whole generation growing up with accessibility to video and video equipment and editing equipment. And of course, my mother's house was the production office and friends would help me and things like that.

Your father, Anders Refn, was a director and editor in the industry. Did you spend any time on the sets of his films?

I grew up on film sets when I was younger. When my parents were divorced. I moved to New York with my mother and step-father when I was eight. But prior, I had been on enough film sets to know it's not a lot of fun for children.

Your father had worked with Lars von Trier, who is an influence on a lot of filmmakers. I don't really see any influence on your films, but did that connection have an impact on you in any way?

No, but it's interesting, because my father was editing Breaking the Waves while I was editing Pusher. They shot in Scotland and we shot in Copenhagen and they were both films that would later on put Danish film on the map internationally. They were both shot with handheld [cameras] and were very rooted in realism. So it's kind of odd when you think about it. We actually had editing suites next to each other. Of course, Lars and my father had the biggest one and we had the closet.

Who have been your influences as a director?

When I was younger, I was very much into genre films, and then I discovered art house films, and then I went back to genre films. I think that there are probably more films that have inspired me rather than directors. The film that made me want to make film in general was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre because that's when I first realized that film was an art form. I saw it as an independent expression using the film medium as an artistic tool.

The first film I ever saw was Fat City, when I was five. I think that one is very much rooted in my constant approach to realism and very natural realism. In Mean Streets, when I was nine, I saw how you could use music in film. But The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was where I really saw film as an art form. This was almost like painting.

I saw Stagecoach when I was very young, maybe five, and that's when I saw that you could actually tell a story. So I guess there's these different things in life that inspire you. It was probably with The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, which I saw when I was 18, that I remember thinking, "Well, that's the kind of acting I want." That's what led me to going to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. John Cassavetes had gone there and I thought, "Well, let's see what he got out of it." It was terrible, I hated it.

The Pusher films, in particular your first two, are set in a similar milieu to Fat City.

You can say that it's a tradition in American films in the late 60s, early 70s, and when the 80's came and went, into the 90s, a kind of fantasy approach that was much more cool. In Denmark, it's very much a political tradition of making films set in a kind of down and out medium, you know, about the working class or the struggles of life. Very opposite to Hollywood.

Was Pusher an attempt to take the crime-chic glamour out of the crime film?

I was very conscious of how the medium, the media, treats crime as a prepackaged entertainment. Which is one thing that it's not. I believe that if you have the opportunity and the privilege to work with art and that you're able to touch people with it, you have an obligation to give them something besides just an amount of entertainment.

You also mentioned Mean Streets. I thought of Mads Mikkelsen's Tonny in Pusher II as in the Johnny Boy tradition: Someone who wasn't that smart but who grew up in that life and had these dreams of what he wanted to be and was completely ill-equipped for it.

Well, yeah, I mean Pusher II is very much rooted in the Shakespearean approach of the father and son stand-off, you know. But that character of Tonny is very interesting in the sense that he's somebody that... the more he tries, the more he fails.

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